The rhythmic repetition of life's cycle-intervals grinds on in circles, round and round through our day, until deep grooves, like shallow character traits, deposit time's tracks into our existence. An intimate arm-round-the-waist dancing partner that weaves his circular steps over hours and in and out between minutes without your noticing that your own little circles are growing smaller while those of your dance-partner stay constant. Out of breath from struggling to keep up, you realise at last that time is the carrier of lessons we must learn, and that if we do not, those lessons are repeated at the next turn. Only more intense.

The more lightly you tread so as not to repeat your own mistakes, and the less attached you become to the circular game of the clock-hands, the better your chances of meeting the constriction of the hour-hand's ever-shrinking circles with a light step. Speed and success do not throw you off balance easily, because you have learned to anchor the content of your moment in a meaning that gives gravitas to your day — and, in the end, to your life.

A tender interplay with your moment establishes soft borders that keep reproaches from the past (with its mistakes) and neuroses over the future (with its vague unknown) away from your heart. A passion for the day, which entrusts its moments to you pleasantly hour after hour to bring about a sensitive trading between the world inside you and the world outside you, drips inspiration into your spiritual bloodstream, making you a participant in eternity — immune to the temporary.

All limitations are stripped of their brutality because you have grown comfortable with the duality of problems. Spiritual insight gives context to challenges, and you know that problems never need to have the last word — God has the last word.

Our anxious identification with the hands of the clock is really just a manifestation of a shallow relationship with ourselves, with others and with God. We enter into conversation with one another, and with God, as if it were a transaction rather than a reaching out of the soul towards meaning and towards healing. The deeper you experience your own sensation of tenderness, the deeper your insight into the lives of others will be.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer