Wheel of Will
The art of getting lost in time.
You are the hub. It is all already turning.
You are the constant in every room of it.
From the moment we are born, we are looking for a place to belong. We look for it in our family, our friends, the people we love. We look for it in our ambitions, our education, the careers we choose, the passions we follow. We look for it in the things we acquire and the security they seem to promise, even in our faith, in whatever we hold sacred. And we do find it, in passing: a moment of belonging here, a sense of home there, whenever life places it in front of us. But all of it comes and goes, the people busy with lives of their own, the pursuits that arrive and pass, the assets that never quite fill the space, the seasons of following, and no single one of them can hold us for the whole of it.
There is one belonging that stays: a life of your own, unaccidental. Grown day by day, from the first breath to the last, until you are so at home inside it that you are free, from there, to be a home for others, gladly, because you belong to you.
A life is shaped at its crossings, the thresholds where one chapter gives way to the next. Each is easier to cross on purpose than by accident.
A clock is a clock.
Time is a lock.
It locks you in
by the actions you took,
by the actions you did not,
by the actions others took,
and the actions no one took.
The past is closed.
The future is unwritten,
built from every YES and every NO
we give to now.
Even the present slips away
the moment we name it.
Today is tomorrow’s past.
Before it closes in on you,
begin now.
And NOW, turned around, is WON.
And what is won, you OWN.
In our home, the clock was set,
on purpose, thirty minutes fast,
a hedge
that made it easier
to lose yourself.
Guests knew, and stayed a little longer.
We sometimes forgot,
and there was the surprise:
time seemed to stop.
Time is the one commodity
no one can make more of.
But a forgotten half hour
can become stillness.
The art of forgetting
is how we learn it.
A clock can be set by your hand.
So can the eye that reads it.
Freedom is waking up
and choosing where to pour
your time, your energy, your attention,
and showing up for it
again tomorrow.
Where you pour it
is where you find yourself.
Each of us keeps a clock of our own.
The one on the wall
is only a bridge between them,
so that we can meet
and honor one another’s time.
We can meet another
only as deeply
as we have met ourselves.
One day, every clock stops.
Until then,
the hands are yours.
A clock is a clock.
Time is a lock.
It locks you in.
Or does it?
You do not have a time problem. You have a capacity problem.
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