Eternity

In a moment, you can be away

in a timeless place of pure attention,

where the air is scented with pure joy.

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You’re there right now, but probably don’t notice

the atmosphere surrounding everything

that ticks like normal, everyday existence.

•

You’re there right now, but probably don’t notice.

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We don’t have to wait until the mortgage is paid, the children are grown, or retirement arrives to feel joy. The best moments aren’t hidden in the future—they’re here now, waiting for us to notice them.

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We find joy where clocks do not tick, where deadlines cannot exist, where appointments vanish like mirages into thin air. It is here now, or it is nowhere.

I learned this in college—sometime during the Pleistocene era—in the most ordinary way. I tried an exercise from Betty Edwards’s book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which was to copy a line drawing of Stravinsky by turning it upside down so you couldn’t think of it as a “face.” I followed the instructions exactly. I traced the unfamiliar shapes as they appeared, line by line, stroke by stroke. When I finished, I glanced up at a clock to discover that forty‑five minutes had passed. It seemed like no time at all. This kind of absorption is the gateway to eternity—the timelessness of children who forget to come in for dinner. The drawing—which was remarkably like the original even though I couldn’t draw at all—glowed with a quiet joy left behind by my brief escape from the river of time.

By the time we are adults, most of us defer joy. When the kids are grown. When the mortgage is paid. When I finally retire. When I get in shape. We stack our days like bricks, waiting for the tower to be tall enough before we climb it and look for joy in the distance.

We can go through life wrestling time. In this mode, the clock is your adversary. Every hour is either gain or loss. Or we can go through life as though it were a meaningful pastime, a playful and at the same time serious engagement with the shining moment before us. The wrestle-mind feels the ticking clock. The pastime-mind feels joy.

The ancients understood this. Aristotle thought of scholē—leisure—not as an escape from work, but as the exercise of a cultivated life. Leisure means the freedom to reflect, to make art, to love what is beautiful, true, and good. Epicurus praised placid joys like friendship, rumination, a good meal. Some moderns understand it too. If you are inclined to visual examples, Sylvia Shaw Judson's little book The Quiet Eye will show you. It is an open secret: the best moments are not waiting in the future. They are already here in the present, if we can let ourselves be absorbed.

We can drop the wrestle-mind but, since it is a habit, we must break it by practicing the opposite habit—the pastime-mind. Three small experiments can help:

• Find one joy today that requires no work. A slant of light through a window. The sweetness of a cherry. The sound of a friend’s voice.
• Relabel one task as play. Water the garden as if you were splashing paint around. Make a meal as if it were a crossword puzzle.
• Set a no‑productivity window. Once a week, designate an hour for no purpose but being alive.

These are not escapes from life. They are life.

Years ago, during a Christmas stay at my in-laws’ house, I wandered to a little pond down a hill behind their yard. The late afternoon was chilly but not cold. A breeze rustled the oak leaves still clinging to their branches and stirred the shadows on the ground. This short solitude was empty of “later” and full of “now.”

That is the truth about eternity. It is not an endless tract of time. It is the absence of time.