A brain injury stole Theresa Byrne’s concept of time—and taught her how to live in the present moment.
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Most of us never question how we think or feel about time itself, but after a serious injury, my healing brain has given me a whole new relationship with time. Since I love to ask questions, I started questioning the constructs of time. Is time really on your side, as the Rolling Stones so eloquently tell us?
Who decided all of this timekeeping stuff anyway? Who got to be in charge of all of this? And can we adjust it to make it better?
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Sundials. Clocks. Time is something we’re expected to understand when we’re young. And there are societal and cultural norms that make being ‘on time’ incredibly important; things run better when everyone is on time. There are consequences for tardiness.
We get ‘9-5 jobs’ that run 8am-7pm. Events happen at certain times. On. The. Dot. People can be fired for being consistently late, and we have labels for people who are often late or who have issues with time. In Sweden several large companies recently moved to a 6-hour workday, and in the US we are struggling with higher rates of depression and anxiety than ever before; what if we’re out of synch with our own clocks?
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What did we do before we had watches?
“Hey Bob, um, can we talk? You seemed to have been here past the sun dial a few times in the past suns and moons. Less meat for you.”
When you’re parenting small kids, you learn that you can’t just say, “We’re leaving.” And “Now” means something different to a kid.
“Hey Bob, um, can we talk? You seemed to have been here past the sun dial a few times in the past suns and moons. Less meat for you.”
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Parenting rule is this: you give them a time (or a countdown) and the kids literally look at you as if to say, “I hear you saying Ten Minutes. I don’t really know what Ten Minutes is, or feels like. But I will nod and look in ways that make you think I understand. When this magical thing you’ve called Ten Minutes happens, I will complain and possibly delay the leaving. You’ve been warned.”
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Time and I have always had an interesting relationship.
Throughout my life I’ve been curious about this thing we call “time”; I just don’t get it. I remember where it began: preschool. While I was a gifted kid, I seemed to have missed the lesson on “how to tell time.” My lack in being able to understand clocks bordered on the ridiculous!
As an adult, I tried to stay away from digital watches and use the clock face kind to force myself to get better at this whole time-telling thing.
I have a running joke that anything that previously happened is “someday before now” with my closest friends, because I could never tell you exactly if it was a year or three years ago.
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I have a running joke that anything that previously happened is “someday before now” with my closest friends, because I could never tell you exactly if it was a year or three years ago.
Fast forward to today. After my brain started healing from a car accident, I was even more “time challenged.” I couldn’t feel time. I started losing time right away, plus I couldn’t keep track of the simple schedule I kept in my head. It was just gone. Time was gone. There was no time. I’d like to take you into my little rabbit hole of time slip.
Time is an illusion. –Albert Einstein
I explained to my friends that I was in some new time-space continuum where time had lost meaning. They laughed. But I meant it. A past memory that pops up has the same feeling as one from a day called “yesterday”; they don’t feel any different. I don’t mean I don’t know what time it is, I have no clue what month or year we’re in.
Several of my close friends saw this when I objectively (I have what I call ’emotional amnesia’, I can’t remember how I felt about things), but repeatedly examined the break up of my marriage over the summer. The only oddity: the break up was actually in 2003. I was going through it as if it happened recently. Then I looked at the calendar and it hit me: we filed for divorce on Labor Day. My brain didn’t know the year, my brain and I were processing an event. One that happened at the same calendar time frame, over a decade ago.
Couple that with the complete loss of being able to feel what a minute or an hour feels like and throw in a bit of ADD: I’ve lost the feeling of time. I can’t tell how long I’ve been doing something, and keep track of what I was doing. The “go/stop” parts of my brain aren’t back online, so I’ve had to set limits, especially around television (wow I can get lost in good shows). I even lost track of time walking. At first I couldn’t figure out how I ended up with blisters on my feet from a walk, I mean, it wasn’t high intensity. So one day I bring my iPhone’s Map My Walk app and I’d been walking almost 7 miles. Who does that?!?
This extends to dates, I can’t conceive what day or date it is: when it’s warm out it could be certain months and if it’s cold outside it could be other months. I mean, really. It’s either flip-flop weather or not. It’s a very simple way to live.
I literally have no idea. No concept. No construct. My brain, the temporal lobe, doesn’t function as a time-keeper for me. I have to use external stimulus to set up reminders and signposts. Some people have an amazing ability to know what time it is, almost without a watch. I’ve always found that nearly mystical. And I have the ability to stay exactly in the present moment that others have said they find refreshing.
I can lose time, hours and even days. To most people that may seem vaguely interesting. But when you have literally no idea what happened over the past week, it can feel really oddly uncomfortable. Part of it is my memory loss—I can’t build short-term memory yet, and part is my inability to judge time. After I finish this article, and it’s edited, I won’t remember writing it. I’ll remember the intuitive concept that created the idea for the article, but what’s actually in the article, I won’t remember. My intuitive memory is actually my strongest. Crazy, huh?
I’ve had friends visit and we can spend three hours in the blink of an eye. Even my friends remark that it seems incredibly odd how fast times goes by. I’ve called it the ‘time slip’. I think that Einstein fellow was onto something, with time being relative and all.
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Today. Now. Right now. Before now. Tomorrow. Next. Last. Later. Sometime. They’re all words we use to describe a concept. Past. Present. Future. This time. Right here. This moment. That time.
There are some benefits to this particular way of being.
- When I see or talk to a friend, we just pick up right where we left off; it’s as if no time has passed. Because in my mind, it hasn’t. And while I can’t necessarily remember every detail we discussed the last time we talked, the feeling of being pleased to connect is always there.
- I don’t often miss people because they are always just right there, where they were last time. My brain doesn’t discern that it’s been months since we’ve spoken.
- I have no choice but to be present.
- Anything that happened in the past, or might happen in the future: I am forced to let go of emotional attachment (fear/worry/doubt) as best I can because I can’t feel time.
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I write this particular column every two weeks, and I share this space with a marvelously talented writer, Louise Thayer. And while my editor may wonder why I’m the flake who can’t remember when it’s “my week,” I literally have no discernible indications on what week it is now. Yes, I have a calendar. Yes, I have alarms on my iPhone. Yes, I have set up little reminders. And still, when you have no concept of time: it makes keeping track of anything time sensitive tricky. When you don’t know what today is, it makes knowing what tomorrow is a bit of a pickle.
Imagine this: if I said to you, “We are leaving on vacation on January 10, 2016.” That would sound like fun! And the date, January 10, would only mean something only if you knew in comparison with what today was; if today was March 10, that would be several months away. When you don’t know what day it IS, it makes planning an adventurous challenge.
I set up lists of to-do’s, and keep track of things so I can continue to share my words, and my work in the world. I try not to let myself worry too much about the future, even though it does tend to be the one thing that makes me anxious.
Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principles of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment.
—-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The biggest blessing that has come from all of this is my ability to stay present.
Since the past is foggy and the future seems so fuzzy, I have no option other than to be in this now, the one that is happening here. And it’s made for some marvelous miracles, being able to truly be present with life and human beings in this manner. I hear a lot of people espouse they’d like to be “more present,” but I would never wish a brain injury of their temporal lobe to have that be the case. Can anyone else learn from how it feels to release time, and be in the moment?
I invite you to step into what it means for you to be present in this way. In this moment, there are no other moments. Clear of the past, and no future happening here: just being and doing now.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
Theresa –thank you for vulnerably and authentically sharing this.
I have built a career on helping people access the present moment –especially in the bedroom where this skill is needed most. Distraction is our 21st century version of SOMA –it is designed (some will say engineered) to help us avoid being present, in the moment. By definition, the here and Now, the Present moment is unpredictable which goes against our survival imperative of seeking “certainty” in all things.
I am sorry for your loss and celebrate your gift and your willingness to share it –thank you!
Thank you so much Michael! Both for your comment and the work you’re doing in the world. Intimacy and connection: talk about some important stuff. The world needs to hear what you’re up to. I watched an except of your TedTalk, very funny and vulnerable stuff! Well done! And thank you for your acknowledgment of my potential grief. It does hit me sometimes. Others– I guess you could say it’s another blessing is that I’m moved away from what I’ve lost, in the normalized sense. I don’t “feel” it the same way as you would expect. It feels like a… Read more »