Does anyone else feel like they are running out of time?

I haven't posted for a while. I've had my reasons. The perennial lack of time thing. Feeling like whatever I might say has already been said, so what is the point, that sort of thing.

In the last few years I've been struggling to find a way to live in this world at this time, a time of deep uncertainty--to do what I need to do to come to grips with the enormity of the challenges of this time of being human on this earth, while still keeping myself in the here and now, where things are really OK--for me, at any rate. It seems like this has been a recurrent theme of the messengers in my life--the "be here now" thing. I'm trying to do that. I get that, that the reality of life isn't what I see, that my human brain probably can't comprehend it--that there is more to life than I see on the surface. But I also know that we're going down a treacherous path--as a nation, as a planet. We have no plan, as Americans, for the future. We hope it will turn out OK. But we have no plan for sustainability, and haven't been able to come to grips with what living unsustainably does to us at a very deep level. We know it can't go on forever. We just want to hope the party lasts long enough for us, and maybe for our children, if we can think that far ahead. I think most of us just try not to think about it too much.

I was reading an article last week in Conscious Choice, a free magazine about town, about a new phenomenon--"Eco anxiety." A term for the people who are freaking out about the state of things. Out of worry about the state of the Earth, of its ability to sustain us over the long haul. About the toxins in the air, the water, the things we live near every day. I think that even for those who don't allow those thoughts to creep too close--perhaps because just getting through today is struggle enough, and there isn't time or room enough to think too much about tomorrow--that on some deep level, it affects us all. I don't think it's an accident that depression is so common in America. There is a deep imbalance in this world, and it is not hard to see. We've been taught that we have to look out for ourselves, because no one else will do it, and yet there is no real safety that doesn't come from deep community.

I have been feeling like time is running out, winding down. My response has mostly been to try not to think about it. To make excuses and to wish and hope a time will come when I'll have the extra time to do the things to make my life align more with what I feel at my core that it should be. I think it's a kind of denial, springing from a grief and fear that I just do not want to feel.

So I can shut it out, try to hold it at bay. Or I can bring it close, and let it propel me to take steps in the direction that calls me. It's the choice I have at any moment. It usually feels easier to push it off, to put it off until another day. There is always so much to do, after all. Damn kitchen just never seems to get clean. But I don't think it's what I came here to do.

I don't know what the answer is, but I think the first answer is to do what I can to try to resist the impulse to not do the things I want to do because I feel like there is no time to do them, because I can see so clearly how that story will end, and that it would be easy to run out a whole life that way. To take steps--even if they are baby steps--to reclaim the time, to do what I can to make it matter, while I have it. While I have this day.

Link:

Conscious Choice article about Eco Anxiety