Stillness

At an early age I remember being aware of the passing of time and the stillness of that moment. You could almost hold the moment in your hand and magnify it and notice every detail of your surroundings and place it on your timeline of life and know you could look back at that moment as a treasure and you’d think, ‘I was five then and now I’m….’ Reflecting on it now brings to mind the Buddha’s words as he recollected his past lives, ‘I was from that tribe, I lived in this place, my family was….’

There was a deep sense of knowledge of both the eternity of the moment, in the quiet reflecting on it, and its fleetingness, as one brought it into the context of the whole of one’s life. I’d never been told about ‘mindfulness’ but it was just there and that link with the finiteness of one’s own life and its changing nature was part of the process of time.