My friend, Alokada, asked me to give this short talk at the National Order Weekend at Padmaloka in December 2006. “Time and Energy” is definitely one of my “themes” or “things” and another friend, Mokshadakini, asked me, the day before, how I felt about giving a talk on something I’ve got in a pickle with so much with over the years – and lately in particular. I pondered this and it occurred to me that there would be many friends in the room when I gave the talk who had helped me wrestle with this.. ie how to do all I aspire to do, without “overdoing” it. (I actually counted up about 12 people present who fell into this category!) I pondered the question quite a bit when I should have been meditating and again, later, as I circumnambulated Dhardo Rimpoche’s stupa outside the shrine room. In the end a word came to me. It was “unrepentent”… and then a wonderful quote from Mary Oliver (who was actually writing about her engagement with poetry) came to mind. The quote was “I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.” So I guess this is a talk on work that is very much still in progress and will be.

In preparing the talk, I came across a mitra project on this very theme which I did 10 years ago and in it, there was this quote…

“Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair truly astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!
For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is not rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you… Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.”

This was the famous novelist Arnold Bennett writing in 1908 in his little book “How to live on 24 hours a day” which I found in a second hand bookshop on the Isle of Wight in 1995. [I discovered you can download this book for free now from www.gutenberg.org]

If you think about it, we can’t literally GIVE time or energy, but our attitude towards both has a huge effect on our ability to give other things. The nub of this issue, it seems to me, is whether we feel we have enough time and energy to enable us to give the other gifts like fearlessness, education and, of course, the Dharma.

Now, interestingly, in Vision and Transformation Bhante chose to describe “Time, energy and thought” as one of the gifts of the Bodhisattva in place of the more traditional “merit”. I suspect this may have been a shrewd kind of skilful means – however much of a beginner one is, one can relate to the idea of time and energy. Indeed, in our culture we can be perhaps a bit preoccupied with the fact that we don’t have enough of either!

When I did the mitra project on this very theme ten years ago, I seached for quotes on both time and energy from traditional Buddhist sources and also from western culture. It was interesting to find that that there was a lot about energy (and not much about time!) in the traditional sources, whereas it was quite the reverse in, say the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which gives more than 3 columns-worth of entries for time and a measly 4 entries to energy.

In “Altruism and Individualism in the Spiritual Life” Bhante defines “what can be given” as “whatever we can possess” – which is an interesting one to ponder.

Part of learning to practise effectively is learning what conditions we need to set up in order to enable us to do and be what we aspire to do and be – on, indeed, to give what we aspire to give. Bhante describes generosity as “the basic Buddhist virtue” and has at some point re-cast the bodhisattva vow in terms of “giving what we can, when we can”…..

Time and energy are related. How we think/feel about our time can affect our energy and motivation profoundly. There are so many ways of stretching and expanding our ideas about time and this can have a huge and exciting effect on our energy – and our capacity to GIVE. (Because we can only truly give from a sense of abundance).

The basic and fundamental issue with both time and energy is our tendency to see both as finite. This can be very demotivating!

We need to understand a balance (for practical purposes) between

·(a)the need to recognise that mundane time and energy are finite so that we don’t squander them. (“This opportune moment is extremely hard to meet….”)

and at the same time…

(b)the need to keep in touch with the aspect of eternity and limitless energy which is represented by the transcendental so that we really believe we can transcend ourselves and our limitations (perhaps over many lifetimes!).

I remember years ago Khemajoti telling me a story about Anjali on one of the Tuscany retreats who was very busy that year with quite a number of women to ordain. Khemajoti asked her how she was managing to keep giving so much time and energy to so many women. She said that for half an hour each day she lay on her bed and imagined she was on solitary retreat…. For her, at that time, that seemed to do the trick! That’s stayed with me for years and I find it very inspiring.

I did ask Anjali if she minded me telling you this. She said it was fine, although she doubted that other people would find it that inspiring. She added that this hadn’t really been an ideal situation, but that it was simply a means to respond to what needed doing. (And it occurred to me that many of us might not be here now, were it not for people like Anjali being able to do things like that!)

Thinking more about our relationship to time and I was struck by the irony of the idea of time management. Actually we can’t manage time. It’s kind of obvious, really, but in fact we can only manage ourselves within time… It might seem like semantics but actually I think it’s an important point. (And it’s interesting to speculate about whether there’d be such a good take up if time management courses were called something like self-management or even perhaps self-discipline!)

So the next thing I want to talk about is the fact that it’s never too late!

I feel as if “it’s too late” was one of the mantras of my childhood – not just that whenever I wanted to start a game of Monopoly it was decreed to be “too late in the evening” but a general feeling of “oh, it’s not worth it now” or “maybe another day”. As is often the way with these things from childhood, I’ve railed against this way of seeing things for 30 years and one of the things I love about the Dharma is the sense that it’s NEVER too late, there is always SOMETHING that one can do (or give!) and that this will have an effect.

We could see this as one useful function of the traditional Buddhist teaching on rebirth… that actually we have lifetimes and lifetimes in which to practise so we needn’t worry, from that point of view about running out of time if we are practising wholeheartedly and creating the conditions for a positive rebirth. We’re not going to run out road… if we just keep practising in the right way, more and more of it will roll out in front of us. So in that sense, there is no shortage of time.

Another perspective on “it’s never too late” is that passage from the Dhammapada (Ch 8 (The Thousands) v 112)….

Better it is to live one day strenuous and resolute than to live a hundred years sluggish and dissipated.

or Bhante’s translation:

Better than a hundred years lived lazily and with inferior energy is one single day lived with energy aroused and fortified.

I think that something that profoundly affects our ability to give is a feeling that “it’s not really worth it” or “it won’t make that much difference”…. all those demotivating things which make a thousand or ten thousand of us all keep our pound coins in our pockets whereas one of from each of us could have a significant effect if we put them all together.

But I seem to have strayed into the language of money (again!) and my brief was time and energy. So I’ve quote the Dhammapada and now I want to quote something from a very contemporary, management-speak source, which is another thing I really love and find very motivating (and because we’re Western Buddhists we can have both simultaneously!)

It’s called the Pareto Principle – or the 80/20 rule and many of you are probably familiar with it. Pareto was an economist and he found that it had been proven time and again, in all sorts of business situations, that 80% of our result comes from 20% of our time and efforts. I find that hugely motivating. Rather than fretting about all those hours and hours in which I might have been constructive, engaged and generous, but was not, I can, instead, focus my energies on at least getting my act together for 20% of the time. If I can really do that THEN I can still have a big effect. There is always something we can do, always some way we can give. Even if we think it’s too late and we’ve not much to give. Even if it’s a simple thank you…

When I was part of the team running the wholefood shop in Croydon we decided one year to send out thank you cards to everyone who’d helped us out during the year as a volunteers. There was one person who’d come in just once and done a couple of hours to help us out one lunchtime. We wrote her a thank you card. As a result of this she got back in touch with us and came and helped out pretty much EVERY Saturday lunchtime for the next year – and at that time we really needed that help. So the fact that we put some time and energy into saying “thank you” had a disproportionately positive result for us. In return, Jane was very generous to us volunteering every Saturday lunchtime, even tho’ she worked full time all week.

A year or two later she was still volunteering but then for various reasons needed to leave her job. As a result of her volunteering, she ended up working full time for a whole year or two in the shop at a time when she really needed work… (and the shop really needed staff!)

So to recap. As I said at the start, it’s a bit ironic but if you look at it literally then we can’t actually given ANYONE time or energy. But on the other hand if we don’t feel we have enough of both, it can be almost impossible to give anything many other things.

I wanted to end with my favourite quote from Dhardo Rimpoche:

“People feel that life is short. Because of this, instead of working for others, they just try to acquire wealth for themselves. If we live in this way, we become isolated. Our lives become like bubbles on the surface of water. But people can be inspired by action. [Which we might understand in this context as energy, or virya] If they see something is happening, they start to give… If you work hard in the right way, it will spread like light.”

Satyalila
November 2006