From Hourglass to Diamond

A short note before I begin: there are still a few places available on my Purpose Discovery Course starting 14 January. This reflection below speaks directly to the heart of that work.

Last month I wrote about my experience of doing nothing.

I emerged from that hibernation more full of the present moment.

I once heard David Abram describe, with a simple image, how our sense of time can often feel. Imagine an hourglass turned on its side. The present moment sits at the narrow centre point, with the future widening out in front of us and the past widening out behind.

It’s an image I can relate to. When I’m not paying attention, I live as though the past and the future are the main event. I ruminate about the past and I worry about the future. Both loom big. And the present, or at least my awareness of it, gets compressed between the two.

But when I really slowed down in December, it helped me to loosen my grip on the past and the future and reveal them as mostly fantasy, projection and broken records.

My mental noise thinned and the present moment widened. The hourglass inverted, becoming more like a diamond.

An enlarged present moment awareness, as if a bubble. A visceral sense of openness, both enveloping and inhabiting me, keeping at bay the looming influence of the past and the future. 

And yet, curiously, both past and future are tended to and mediated by this expanse of the present moment. Regrets are laid to rest, unknowns are trusted.

I wanted to say that our life ‘begs for our attention’, but I don’t think it does.

I think it calls to us, and if we don’t recognise it, it passes us by.

To abandon this present moment is to abandon ourselves, along with any purposeful endeavour we might have.

As another year passes us by in a flash, may this coming year for you be ever more the diamond than the hourglass.

May you find pockets of stillness to inhabit and be inhabited by. May you be at the tip of the diamond, at the crest of the unfolding wave of the moment. And thus be unburdened from, or even shielded from, your need of certainty. 

I know your life will be bigger and more alive for it. I know your future depends on it.