A watched pot never boils
We all know what time is, but very few could hope to explain it. The reason being is that we all hold a concept of time, and this concept may differ from parson to person, or between cultures and periods (…of time?). In practical terms, time is what we use to describe the order in which events take place. We represent it with clocks, sundials and hourglasses, among other things, but are these showing time? An hourglass relies on sand falling due to gravity, so does that mean there’s less time on the moon because the sand doesn’t fall as fast? No, but this does illustrate that time as we experience it is always relative. It depends on a reference point. Where you are in the world will dictate how you read a sundial. A common physics definition of the second is the time taken for light to travel 299,792,458 metres in a vacuum. In this case the speed of light is used as a reference point, because it doesn’t change. But then, a metre is sometimes defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second. Also, if a body is moving at the speed of light, then time is said to stop for it. Thus, defining time can prove challenging, especially if the definition is to be meaningful and useful in everyday life. Measuring one second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium atom is well and good for an atomic clock, but the references points we use in our lives must be more tangible to be of any use.
There is no definition of time, but many concepts of it, and many symbols of its passage.
Some are artificial and meaningless to us in everyday life (like the speed of light example above), whereas others, such as the passage of day and night, may affect us greatly.
The lesson of these examples is that time as most would use it is a way of comparing events in the order that the happened. With our memories being highly suggestible, these sequences can be distorted and thus the past cannot be considered truly. As such, there is no past, as this exists only in our memories. Similarly, there is no future, as it may only exist in our imaginations. Because both past and future depend on our own minds, and each person’s mind is different, they do not exist. What does exist is the now, the ima, which is the only thing we can truly perceive. This perception of the flow of time can, of course be, altered with drugs, or simply changing the focus of attention, but our perception of the present is all that we have to rely on. And so we do.
The fact that in training the more you rush the less time you have to get there suggests the concept of time is indeed a fluid one, depending on how much you’re paying attention either to timing or to your opponent’s movement.
In mokuso meditation, we have a tool to help us grasp the now, and by putting this mental stillness into practice when training, we as martial artists can prevent the need to rush to meet an opponent, and end up clashing in the process. After all, a watched pot never boils. In the same way, a watched uke never strikes. But they still end up hitting you.
