A friend described his thoughts about living as a part of a culture that had no notion of time and no words for time. They did without any measure or indicator of the passage of time.
When one would agree to meet another at a future date down the river, no time was implied - it couldn't be. The geography was understood (where), but "when" was left dangling. A great deal of waiting is implied.
"Waiting" is an interesting subject, I think.
Being tight with money and suspicious, I bought a very inexpensive computer. It was okay at the beginning but over time, maybe 2 or 3 years, it has gotten slower. Going from being completely off to a fully functioning state is slow and I have to wait. Lynn has a newer and more expensive computer and when I turn them both on, I can easily see how much slower mine is.
I keep telling myself that the slow computer, the traffic light taking minutes to turn green, waiting for the time for coffee or alcoholic drinks to arrive - I can see many times of waiting as opportunities. I can check my posture, I can take deep breaths, I can try to remember what the hell I was planning to do next. There are opportunities to be taken advantage of and it is wasteful and silly to merely fret and gnash and fidget when they arrive.
I read about a tribe moving into position for a hunt and waiting there for other hunters to arrive. The description included quite a period of waiting, maybe weeks. I thought I would probably be in a sour, anti-social mood after waiting and waiting for others. I learned back in childhood that wanting the weeks to pass before Christmas morning didn't have any noticeable effect on them.
Meditation has been quite valuable and positively transformative for me and it definitely involves waiting and sensitivity to waiting and awareness of my inner states while using the period of meditation. Quaker worship involves time passing and an impatient person can allow the period to be simply an irritant instead valuable, reflective and holy.
I have certainly found that concentrating on something or thinking about something makes time for waiting fly by. If I carefully examine and fully sense a single inhalation of breath and then carefully enjoy every sensation of exhaling that breath, savoring every feeling of it, including appreciating how excellent or superficial that breath and those feelings are, the breath takes up time. When I set a timer for ten minutes and examine my breaths fully during that time, it can be almost too quick to pass.
