Many people have remarked to me over the past few years that, in their experience, time seems to be speeding up. Their lives seem, somehow, to be in a fast forward mode. The feeling is that time is going by very quickly and yet, not enough, if anything, is really being accomplished. Either, there is an increasing amount to do with a shrinking time frame in which to do it or a lot of time has passed, in a flow of fog, and one is not sure how exactly this happened.
Much of the reality of time is how we experience it. If time seems to have disappeared, evaporated or have passed unnoticeably, the problem is not time. The problem is distraction. Distraction is the loss of focus. It is the loss of our sense of direction. It occurs when we become so rapped up in the events of our lives, that we lose track of the reality of our lives. When we become enmeshed in the process of earthly existence, we end up disconnected and distant from the purpose our souls have for being here.
To live our lives to the fullest, it is most important that we are not distracted. We must be vigilant in making sure that we are not thrown off track in the course of our everyday life. For, if our daily life is impaired, damaged or negated, it impacts heavily on the entire fabric of our existence. If the course of our lives is diverted from its true path, our potential is not being fulfilled, and our life purpose is not being achieved.
If we are not in touch with our true self, our true feelings and our soul’s purpose, we are not really alive. We are merely subsisting in an illusion. We are functioning, but we are not fulfilling. We are struggling to exist, but we are not truly living. The result of not living one’s purpose is to end up existing in a state of distraction.
Whether one is numbed or obsessed, blown away or driven, euphoric or in great pain, it is all distraction. Daily life with its survivalist pressures, its peaks and valleys, its mercurial demands, its conflicts and its pain can often draw much of one’s energy, concern and attention into the heart of the storm. The more one is pulled into the tempest of earthly struggle, the farther one is drawn away from self. One becomes lost in the maelstrom of need and desire.
The real You, the soul, cannot be heard through all of the noise nor be felt through all of the commotion. The still, small voice within is simply overpowered. The result is that we either identify with the storm, making our lives intense and dramatic or we seek to escape the turbulence altogether. The sense, that time is moving very quickly, is often the result of being lost in space, emotionally, psychologically and psychically.
How do we reconnect with our Self? How do we reestablish our link to life purpose? How do we learn to disengage from the level of duality, the level of psychological and emotional turbulence and to live our lives from the perspective of the soul?
In the Mishnah, in Tractate “Pirkei Avot”, we are advised, that to truly experience life, to live life from the soul’s perspective, one should live every day of one’s life as if it were one’s last day on earth. Live each day of your life as if it were the day of your death. That is the instruction. It is a profoundly important and transformative approach to life.
Judaism teaches that the soul is the essence of each individual, that the soul was formed before we were born into the earthly realm and will exist eternally in higher worlds, when the soul finally departs from the mortal coil. Death is the transition point between mortal life and eternal life, Between this world and the next world, is the eternal moment.
If we experience each day as the last day of our lives, each day has a totality and a finality of it’s own. It is the culmination of everything that came before it and it is the very focus of our life, for there is no future as we have understood or experienced it. The past is fully absorbed in the present and the future is fully nascent in the self same present. It is all one. There is only today. One comes to live in the reality of every moment, because the reality of the moment is all that is.
By living one’s life as if each day was the last, each day of our life becomes a day of judgment and a day of salvation. One’s life becomes one long day of truth, of focus, of light and of life purpose. This day of fulfillment is the day of salvation. On this day, illusion disappears. On this day, distraction ends. On this day, time no longer regulates nor dominates your life. Rather, it melts away into timelessness. One is free. One is free to simply be.
May we all heed well, the words of our sages and return to our essence, reconnecting with our purpose, living our lives from the perspective of the soul and daily expressing the true nature of our unique spirits. In this we receive direct assistance from God. There is no human endeavor, that God is more interested in.
Rabbi Fisdel