A Time Being

There are, according to a classic Zen Buddhist text, a little under six and a half billion moments in one 24-hour day, 65 of them in a finger-snap.

If you snap your fingers and do so 98,463,077 times over the next 24 hours, "you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

That's what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die."


That, it seems to me, is why spending at least part of each day in the present moment, not scripting, planning, looking back, anticipating, etc etc etc - is so supremely important. Being a time being is to be less frightened of time passing because time beings are truly living in and with time.

To understand how quickly time flows is to stop being anxious about it. To accept that everything is always changing, at its own speed, is to let go of what cannot, in any case, be held on to.


The Zen text is Shobogenzo, by Dogen. The novel Jiko and the rest of the above quotation is taken from is :

Cropredy Mindfulness

I've been drying out, over the last couple of days, after my visit to Fairport Convention's Cropredy Festival, at the village of that name near Banbury. (If those names mean nothing to you, other perhaps than "Banbury," I'll add a brief paragraph at the end of this post to whet your appetite...)

The Met Office were heroically incomepetent on this occasion, forecasting light showers and dry periods Thursday, and cloudy with sunny spells for Friday and Saturday. In fact, the showers were heavy and frequent right through the weekend, which made many of us cross because we came underprepared. On Saturday night there was a torrential downpour complete with lightning. The site turned muddy and a bit squalid (though nothing like Glasto mudbaths of yore.)It really would help if all us peace and love newagers stopped dropping litter into the mud.. but that's another story.

Festivals are a strange and interesting environment to me, but I'll get to the point soon, so for now, just to say that the intense throng (only 20,000, but a small arena), the evil weather, and middle-class late-middle-aged neuroses about the best time to visit the chemical toilets, (really not so bad, comparatively speaking) how to keep relatively clean in the mud, how to eat something nice that didn't cause repeat visits to aforesaid loos,anxiety over the integrity of the tent, combined to produce in your reporter a fine mix of tension and exhilaration.

How to maintain a degree of balance and calm, so as to get the most from this event?

Mindfulness.

Not easy in this context, but I can report a couple of modest successes. One brief period where I managed to feel entirely in the present moment, in my tent, at a safe distance from Rick Wakeman - only about five or ten minutes, trying to think only of my breathing, bringing my thoughts back every time they strayed. Seemed to help a bit.

Another moment: after a splendid breakfast at the village hall (what lovely people)I wandered into the large and beautiful old church and sat down. As my regular reader will know, I am not a Christian, but one would have to be exceptionally insensitive not to find in such a place an inherited calm, the result of centuries of ritual, spirituality, tranquil thought. It was not difficult to be present and undistracted in there. Not for long, though - a little girl came in with her dad, she just wanted to see what was inside. All fine. I didn't feel like shutting these people out, so "hello," and on with the day.

A different moment - the excitement of being close to Bellowhead at full throttle. Totally absorbing, and in a sense entirely present, but not the reduction of thought and feeling that you get from mindful meditation. So - a different sort of presentness.(Have you seen them? Dangerously good, brilliantly theatrical, unique.)

Lastly, in the middle of what to me was, I'm afraid, a horrible "Celtic" rock "opera" (sorry boys) about King Arthur - the storm and rain smote us. Just when I was deciding that I would never attend another outdoor festival, and wishing all heavy rock guitarists eternal incarceration in sound-proof rooms, IT happened with my doing almost nothing: instead of grumbling about what should be/might have been/won't be/wasn't, I was there, not caring about what might happen, not categorising or assessing the experience, just being there, with these people, now. I held on to that for a bit. It felt like freedom to me.

Then the Arthurians cleared off, Fairport were left to their own excellent devices, we had "Matty Groves," "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (I get closer to tears with that as the years go by, a moment of finely-wrought sentiment) and finally and forever, "Meet On The Ledge."

Brief moments of mindfulness that enriched the weekend and helped me to get the most from it. Not the regular meditation set-up, just the best I could do on the hoof. It still helped.

I'll try to write abit more about this business of being in the present, another time.

Note: Fairport Convention - the band that more or less started the "electric folk" or "folk rock" genre. Many lineups down the years, and some truly exceptional talents (Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicoll, Daves Pegg and Swarbrick)they can play and have played almost anything. "Folk" is a pallid term for this music. They have run a festival in the Oxfordshire village of Cropredy, near Banbury,for thirty years. They have an excellent relationship with the village. (The festival originated in a scratch gig at the village fete - two of the band lived there then.) The festival is limited in size, very well-organised, has a very wide range of music (this year brilliant jazzer Martin Taylor, young traditional guns Breabach from Scotland, singer/songwriter Thea Gilmour, Mabon from Wales, Status Quo for goodness' sake, Little Feat, Fairport themselves etc etc - so not really just a folk festival but plenty of folk, folkesque and traditionally-derived music. Very good value at £85 or so. No or very little crime, and so far as I could see, no drunken fights etc. A powerful tradition of meeting up with friends year after year. If you don't want to camp, you can B&B in banbury. If you've a narrowboat, it's on a canal. Excellent and very large bar - Wadsworth's 6X. Nicely sloping arena field. If you want to know more, go to FC's website. If you're already bored - sorry. Even funerealists and would-be meditators have to let their hair down sometimes...