How to Pause Time
Musings on the nature of time, how to stretch it and yoga classes to help.
“That's the thing with time, isn't it? It's not all the same. Some days - some years - some decades - are empty. There is nothing to them. It's just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.” ― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time
There is a point in the year, and this feels like it could be it, when time is at a turning point - both interminably dragging ( more cold, more damp, more grey, the steps to spring so inordinately small) but also as though the year is finding a certain momentum. There are already so many markers in the rear view mirror and yet have I even begun?
The almost inevitably slow start of the year feels like it offers up so much extra time - too much even- and yet when the momentum builds, as it will from here on, there can be a strange altercation between being desperate for change and still not quite in our own driving seats. Ready, but also not.
The length of the months differ according to more than just their days. Surface time might tick along in its apparently metronome like way; second and minute and hour and day counted out with an illusion of order. And yet we will have all had the experience of the real time that lies beneath the clock; time that contracts or stretches, like putty.
Only the other day I was telling the story of a car accident I was in some years back when absolutely true to what I had always been told, the moment of impact- a total of several seconds at most- stretched into a timescale so apparently elongated and accompanied by the strange and watery soundtrack of sound slowed down to half speed, that I can remember every singular movement and thought. Is that just sheer and acute presence in action?
Less dramatically, we have all had time when we have been so absorbed in something- a good book or a conversation, a love affair or a song - that we lose track of time and even place; inhabiting the part of our brain that is most associated with the flow state but feels even more magical than what science might explain. And do you remember the boredom of an old fashioned childhood - days that felt like weeks, watching droplets of rain track down window panes, waiting for life to begin? My particular brain has absolutely no capacity for deep science but even a tiny foray into thinking about time and how it morphs starts to bend my thinking in a way that I find increasingly appealing.
When I have the time for it.
For sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, as the year begins to gather more days within the folds of its own skirt, its pace will also increase. And all too soon we will have gone from a desperate desire for something to happen to feeling slightly out of breath, often without enough of anything else in between.
One of the hallmarks of the modern world - and it seems to start in Spring- is a pervasive sense that we are having to slightly run ( or brisk walk at least) to keep up. That we are beholden to the sensation that everything is happening at a place just beyond our stride. Not exactly tripping forward but on the exact edge of doing so.
The strange thing about that sensation is that it can be tantalising from where we are now. Is there a part of us that always wants to be so busy we might boast of it? By the end of winter even the more measured seem to be ready for the momentum of spring. And yet, there can be a corollary resistance that I can only now imagine to be some sort of wisdom- that we know we don’t want to get swept up in the same old tumble of excess. That we know we need to take into the next season the lessons of this last one, which could be as simple as a renewed capacity to pause. And the knowledge that we might alter time when we do so.
Because the winter we are leaving behind, with all of its dark and its quiet and its introversion, with it’s seeming excess of time is still available to us in the quiet of every late night and the deep dark skies of every new moon. It is available, too, any time when we take a moment be still and quiet for long enough - in a deliberate backlash against the lurching forward - to allow our intuition to take the reigns from our rational mind.
We can not stop the march of time and we wouldn’t want to. Finitude lends so much angst but also majesty to living. And there is reassurance to be had from the sun rising of an every morning, in the reliable turn of the seasons. But we can play - when we feel we need to- with the time we have, falling into step with any welcome momentum but also slowing things down when they starts to race ahead, with something as simple as paid attention.
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CLASSES THIS WEEK
I am in India preparing for my yoga retreat in Goa next week, so this Tuesday’s session is a pre-recorded class dedicated to this week’s new moon.
The class is booked in the same way as the live session, but your confirmation email will have the recording within it and will be available straight away. And the recording will last two weeks ( but the class can also be downloaded, so in theory it could last forever).
Book here for this week’s class recording.
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NEXT YOGA SERIES Tuesdays 18th March to 15th April 2025
‘Spring Via the Senses’ - A Yoga Series
It has been utter magic to be back on the mat with so many of you- so the plan is to continue.
The next series of Tuesday sessions ( to join live or as a recording sent weekly, or both) will start on Tuesday 18th March and will run for five weeks.
There is the option to come to the classes as individual sessions or book the whole series as a discount with a pass. All the details are on the bookings page.
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