Time is a funny thing, isn’t it? To some people, it’s completely linear and one-sided; time moves at the same speed always and nothing can stop the movement of time. To other people, its fluid or it doesn’t mean anything, just a silly concept to herd us all to meals and sleep at the same time. For most of my life I feel squarely into the first category, craving the rigidity of a schedule like a glass of rosé in a New York City summer, but I’ve found so far in 2016, I’ve shifted to somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. The loss of traditional weekends to YTT has meant that time has just sort of existed for me in the past three weeks; I wake up around the same time every day and move through a schedule until it’s time to sleep and do it all over again.

The weekends in particular are when I notice that time stops “existing” in favor of finding that perfect joy in a new day. We start our YTT days with 30 minutes of meditation, which if you’ve never meditated before, is a LONG freaking time to sit in stillness, but stopping and pausing and forgetting about the tick, tick, tick of the clock is a great way to center yourself ahead of 10 hours in the studio. It makes those long days feel like minutes. I’ve noticed since starting YTT even the work days don’t follow normal time, moving quickly and slowly and then not at all and then all at once; carrying that meditative stillness into the work week means my days don’t feel like slow honey down a cold spoon any longer, no more energy wasted willing the clock to race forward to 6pm.

Time has been on my mind a lot this week, to be sure, with a particular focus on the future. First its moving too quickly in all the stillness of the past three weeks; I’m already halfway done with YTT and big plans I thought I wanted feel like they’re running at me full speed. And then it stops moving altogether in this perfect stillness of meeting two little miracles that have completely captured my soul, their little beating hearts in either hand captivating every piece of me. It’s why I haven’t posted any entries here for a week, this strange movement of time, because somehow it seemed more important to ignore how many days had passed between posting in massive favor of living for however many days I needed to.

So why all the hippie speak about time? Because this week time slapped me hard in the face with a reality check that for all the dreamy moments where things move on these different waves, time is still a real thing that moves and grows and evolves the way the rest of us do. Six months ago I fell in love with an idea about six months from now; seeing how everything has changed makes me so confused about where things may end as time ticks on. Has this passage of time given me the change that I was craving enough to uproot everything I knew six months ago? Or do I have blinders on with all these changes around me now because part of me may still want to uproot and start over. This heady mix of the past and the present and the future are never far from my thoughts these days, and maybe the only release I have is losing myself in the minutes or days or hours or months where time stops existing and I’m able just to live.

To live is to understand that time is precious because it moves even when we stop. I need a few more days where time stops though; I need just a few more days to enjoy time moving the way it moves instead of torturing myself trying to slow it down so I can make a decision because I can’t delay that decision forever. Forever doesn’t have to mean never and it doesn’t have to mean now, though. Forever can mean whatever I need it to right now, in this impossibly quick and perfectly slow moment in time.