When I broke my leg in a road accident years back, the doctor told me that it would take about 3 months to be back to normalcy. 3 months? Too long to be physically constrained by the bed, crutches, walker. Then with the afforded time glued to the bed, I was fascinated to learn how broken bones join up, how collagen & cartilage are built to heal the wound. Research has shown that meditation can fast-track this healing process. That was the first time I came to know that we could influence something as natural as healing and the time to heal is an individual capacity. Healing time is an individual experience.
Now, do you know that in long-distance running like a marathon, where the runners run over 2 hours, winners win by a margin of mere 10-15 seconds? They use time quite differently in course of their run. While for the first part of their run, they make use of co-contestants for pacing themselves, in the last mile they try to win & every second matter during the last mile. In other words, long-distance runners interpret time differently in course of their run.
Is 7-minutes too long for a speech? If you are on the stage and well–prepared to relish the opportunity, the speech will be short-lived for you as well as for your audience. An unprepared speaker knows how long 7-minutes is.
How fast you heal, how well you run, and how long you speak – all depends on how you interpret the ‘time’ of that experience. If you are going through a boring or depressing phase, your days seem to be longer. If you are enjoying your life, time will be fleetingly scarce, and you will still have so many things to catch up with. Einstein wrote – “When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.”
What ‘time’ is for you? As short or long as the high or low of your experience? Can you change that perception in your head? Can you start ‘courting’ the time which is like a ‘red-hot cinder’ otherwise? Think about it!
Originally published on Facebook on Jan-06-2017