I don't have time. That's never true. Being busy isn't a time problem... it's an attention problem. And we almost never think of attention as what time is actually made of.
There's chronological time.
A natural phenomenon. The sun rising and setting. The seasons. The lunar and solar cycles. Divided into concepts like seconds, days and years so we can coordinate and communicate.
A facilitation. A measure. A tool.
That’s all.
But then we develop a habit of objectifying that coordination overlay.
A concept. A thing. An experience.
It becomes Experiential Time.
And, in doing so, we completely obscure the fact that we are what gives time its meaning - through our attention we make time real.
We inadvertently allow the measure to proxy the experience.
We start to think of time as something we have. A commodity we're given and have to make something of.
I don't have time - that's never really true. What's true is that my attention is elsewhere. Or split so many ways it can't settle anywhere. The scarcity is in the attention, not the concept that measures.
Busy is the word we use. But busy isn't a time problem. It's attention shredded across so many demands - real and imagined - that none of them receive enough of it to feel complete. So everything feels undone. And undone things pull at attention. All those open loops clamouring for attention.
The clock measures none of this. Your presence does.
If you wake up naturally, without seeing a clock or a calendar, you wake up and give attention to whatever is present. You spend your day, being who you are and doing what comes naturally, without ever thinking how much or how little time you have - because there's nothing to measure against. There's just the day unfolding. Things to be done and not done. You do them both with equanimity.
Until you impose a structure on top. And then there's something to measure against. This should have been done. This shouldn't have been done.
We're always putting a scale on top of our attention.
Is this valuable? Is this justified? Is this good?
Your experience of time is based on your experience of attention. Give something your full attention and the experience of time expands till there's no boundary. Fragment your attention and time feels tight, contracted, never enough.
Sleep is the most glorious non-feeling because you are giving it your full attention. You know you slept well... but you have no recollection of it. Because the imagined self isn't present to judge or fragment attention.
That's what timeless actually is. Not some esoteric or mystical achievement. Just whole attention, undivided, resting on what is present.
You are the timeless reality that gives conceptual time its essence.
Remove the map. Live the territory.
“The main hindrance lies in our idea of, and addiction to, time, in our habit of anticipating a future in the light of the past. The sum total of the past becomes the 'I was', the hoped for future becomes the 'I shall be' and life is a constant effort of crossing over from what 'I was' to what ‘I shall be'. The present moment, the 'now' is lost sight of.”
Excerpt From I Am That: Talks With Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Nisargadatta Maharaj