Sunday Night

This is the night of the week when I want to squeeze all I didn't get to during the weekend into these final hours before bed. When I wish there was another weekend before Monday. When my resolutions to go to bed early for once begin to seem unrealistic. And, sometimes, tho I hate to admit it, I start to panic a little. Not enough time, not enough time....

Last night I read this great passage in The Possibility of Everything, a memoir I'm currently reading by Hope Edelman (who has a lovely blog). (The book doesn't come out until September, but I got my hands on a review copy and I haven't been able to stop reading).

Here's the passage about time:

"I heard an interview with an excerpt on the Maya calendar. He was talking about the concept of time acceleration...We use a base-ten system for calculating time, but the Mayans used a vigesimal system, meaning base-twenty math. According to their calculations, each of the Nine Underworlds lasts for exactly one twentieth the time of the one it's built upon. For example, as the man on the radio explained it, the Seventh Underworld, which started in 1755, is 256 years long. The Eighth Underworld, the one we're in now, started on January 5, 1999, and will last for less than thirteen years--which is one twentieth of 256. The ninth and final underworld starts in February 2011 and will last for only 263 days. This is why, the man said, it took 15 billion years for cells to develop but only about a dozen for the Internet to take hold. Because the shifts between periods of light and dark happen twenty times faster in each new underworld, the amount of change that used to take place in a lifetime now occurs in a single year. If it feels as if time is speeding up, the man said, that's because it is."

From The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman, pp 112–113, copyright 2009. Random House.

Now I must go read a paragraph or two of E-Tolle. Come back to the Now, baby.