Time and Tide

On Sunday morning (or afternoon), it is time to wind the clock. It may not actually be the time, but it is the day. Time to add more time to the time-measuring device. Time will continue unfettered, of course, but my ability to measure it, to make distinctions about it will diminish somewhat if I don’t wind it. It is a grandfather clock, and I often note the hour or half-hour when it chimes. Sunrise and sunset will prevent too much drift in my sense of time, but the pigeonholes that I use to organize the days might shrink, swell or slant a bit. Softer, more malleable days might arise: a few more moments during the breakfast hour; a few more minutes of night; a more compact afternoon or mid-morning. Maybe time would stretch and compress throughout the day with my changing heart rate, since heartbeats might remind me of clocks: a regular tempo, marked by staccato thumps.

Our clocks might be somewhat more generous and peaceful if they mimicked our breathing instead: a gentle swelling and receding. The term tidal volume refers to the amount of air we cycle through during a normal, resting breath. Our breath is an invisible tide: slow and smooth in comparison to our heartbeat. “Tidal” sounds natural and congruent with the world. The sound of waves on the shore or a loved ones breathing—is there a difference?

Besides, marking the precise point of emergence of a specific second isn’t necessary for most of us. Most of us need to know the time in a wider sense, zoomed out to minutes and hours; pulled back and viewed against the backdrop of other events. The rhythm of things is what’s important—we use time to achieve a kind of synchronization, to be in step with each other. We most often are striving for kairos (timing) more than chronos (time).

It is interesting to note that an instruction in meditation is very frequently given to observe your breath. The long and ancient line of practitioners cannot have arrived at this bias absent-mindedly—they’ve had plenty of time to consider it. So I wonder if one reason for it is that we can (and perhaps unwittingly do) subtly adjust our breathing directly, but not our heart. Other practices make use of this as well, teaching coordination of the breath with movements of the body in yoga, martial arts and sports. We shape the kairos of our breathing according to the demands of our exertions, even as the chronos of our heartbeat pounds away in our chests, unattended. And yet the insistent punctuation of the ticks and tocks of time bring to mind the heart more than the breath.

I don’t begrudge our grandfather clock for its lack of resemblance to the tides. (Besides, its pendulum creates gentle, comforting beats and its chime is warm and low.) It’s not likely that there is a good design for a clock that is modeled more literally after our lungs. And, after all, the swing of a pendulum obeys the same natural law of increase followed by decrease—just along a small, slender arc rather than through the expanding and contracting volume of two irregularly shaped balloons.

Soporific

Developing any skill requires feedback: information about how you’re doing, preferably while you’re in the act of doing it. Sleep does not work this way. With sleep, you lie very still and wait, and if everything goes well you wake up later and don’t remember much. It feels like the opposite of skill.

Sleep does seem to benefit from ritual and preparation—good “sleep hygiene”—like refraining from certain things just before bed: caffeine (a stimulant), alcohol (a depressant), eating a big meal (which makes you tired), exercise (which makes you very tired) and bright lights (which make you squint your eyes). So finding a ritual that makes you relaxed and “ready for sleep” is something that can be refined, as long as it doesn’t involve eating or drinking or doing anything. So at the end of the day (literally), a sleep ritual can be somewhat hit and miss, which occasionally leaves you in the dark (literally and metaphorically), wondering what to do next.

I’ll offer something that seems like technique but probably isn’t: observing and manipulating your breath. Look, you’re already lying still in the dark, so you’re like 85% of the way there—you just need to do the sleepy part now. The only other thing you can control is your breath: you can try to breathe like you do when you’re asleep. You can focus on the rising and falling of your chest and try to imagine or remember what the rhythm of your breath is when you’re very relaxed; and you can try to simulate it. With any luck, you can focus on trying to slow down and lengthen each breath so much that you eventually sink into that deeper level of relaxation and find yourself…

Three Keys

Breath is life: breathing is the most important movement we have some control over.

Movement—mindless movement, movement that requires attention, concentration and effort, big or small, gentle or vigorous—helps the mind to see things more clearly. Mostly by taking our minds off of whatever our minds are doing and letting our body mind us.

Writing refines thinking.

Breathe, move, write, repeat.