… time captured by a camera: gone all details, gone most colours …
I have no time to read all my friend’s blogs. Sometimes I feel guilty about it, sometimes I think I’m missing something, often I think I will catch up during the long winter evenings that are approaching.
Time is a dictator. It doesn’t even exist. It’s necessary to make appointments, and to make formulas in physics work, but in life there is only now.
My mind does not accept this. My mind clings to time. It wants to have this dictator. Perhaps time is necessary for my mind to ‘know’ it exists.
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Next to time is balance. I don’t know balance. My life has seldom known balance. And when I really look back there never has been real balance at all. Only priorities.
We can follow our priorities, but we will only seldom create balance while doing so. We can go for those priorities, and the rest is the flow of life.
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It’s summer now, the kids have holidays. Kids have always been my priority. Kids and family first, then next is occupying myself in a creative way and getting paid for it. The latter is not work. Work is not much different from organised religion. Work is organised labour, organised thinking, organised creativity 🙂 … it’s mediocre, and the schedule is balanced. And so is the cheque at the end of the month.
I have been inside such systems for a small amount of time: the first time lasted a year, the second job lasted a month, the third 3 years.
Then came organised ‘freedom’ (or bondage) in having a business, and then a job again, this time for 2 months. The past 18 months have been not-organised and were very interesting.
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Kids have not always been my priorities. I think I had no priorities at all before they came. I followed the flow of Tilopa’s song. Unknowingly. We all do. We resist it, our mistake. Resistance is futile. Following the flow without resistance is another dimension.
And now it’s summer. Kids are very often home, and paid creativity is also booming. This will not last. School will soon start. And paid assignments are never predictable.
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There is no balance, … only priorities, and our never ending resistance against the flow of life:
comparing reality to how things should be
or comparing past to how things should have been.
Your Life Solutions 
Great coincidence – this is one of the first posts I read now after a longer online break! Currently – hardly blogging myself – I am not able (or willing :-)) to follow-up on other blogs, too. I am still in the middle of my experiment – I plan to be back in September. But this is not a deadline!
I’m slowly waking up from blogging ‘silence’ – writing more again these days and reading bits and pieces, that my visitors have jotted down. Not using the Reader or Feedly.
Hi! Amazing Post! Thank you so much Bert. 🙂 Love it. You are so insightful.
Thank you, Season – feels good to post here 🙂
Great post. Great window into your mind– the “other”and your life which is important and interesting. I have been sick, may have Lyme disease, and the blog has been a real drain to keep up, with reading others’ posts, commenting and responding to my readers. Not much time or strength for housework, creativity and keeping up with time. Right now time is my enemy because I can’t use it to do what I need to do–or should say–want to do. Anyhow great post and really love the photo. You are a good Dad. My husband is my priority but I need lots of alone time. Fortunate my so does he. Kids are different. They need your all.
Sorry to hear you are down with illness. It reminds me of the slow days in April I had to undergo. I hope you will recover really soon.
I also need my time alone, and right now, when time alone is scarce, I’m often quite an annoying person to live with.
Time is always an enemy if you let him be a dictator. I have a project deadlining in 3 weeks from now. I really dislike the dictatorship of the deadlines. Somehow, I imagine there is something good about this. One is really forced to stop procrastinating.
So in 3 weeks, I’ll feel a lot more freedom. Whether I will really be more free? Probably not, only less bound by my own mind …
Thank you, dear Bert. I did think of your time of illness. Good luck with the three week deadline. I find them anxiety producing. I have three weeks of antibiotics to go. Maybe we both will feel better if not freer then.
Certainly more free, and in my case less inhibited by the mental obscuration brought forward by the fear of the unknown …
Reblogged this on who is bert and commented:
… a guest post at your life solutions blog on the subject of life, time, balance, resistance and priorities …