What follows is time -- mine to write it, yours to read it. It is about liberation from time-as-suffering, and about dancing with time as a Buddhist practice. It is about the liberating of time -- yours and other people's. And finally it is about liberation into time.

Impermanence -- nothing lasts -- is one of the three characteristics of being taught by the Buddha. Since my Sixtieth birthday each springtime has seemed more marvelous than the last. However, our modern culture gives us a lot of help eluding this sense of mortality. Time-suffering seems to have shifted now to the twenty-four hour clock.

In our over-developed world, for those who have jobs, there seems less and less time. More and more time is worked to earn the money needed to enjoy the ever widening range of goods and services which supposedly make diminished leisure time more enjoyable. This is the consumerism of time. Being in a hurry is a mark of success. And it makes the permanently unemployed (who have to kill time) feel inadequate.

Of course, an inner speediness has always been a means of avoiding the inner void; this is one of the first discoveries we make on the meditation cushion. As Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit (from "Alice in Wonderland"), clock in hand, observed: "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." Our speedy contemporary culture is a technological and social expression of that inner delusive speediness, as well as a response to external problems. And our speedy culture, in turn, gives speedy ego a frenetic diurnal boost. We want it now, with minimum inconvenience, and are increasingly acculturated to expect it now. For example, we now need information technology to control the organizational and industrial complexity created by our mass acquisitiveness. But also, because it's there, now, at the touch of a keyboard, we can't resist the buzz of instant convenience: the telephone answering machine, then the fax, then the modem. We have more information but less time, and hence less reflective knowledge, and certainly less wisdom.

Pity the engaged Buddhist, trapped in this cage of time 'n' tasks! How do I find the time to meditate (another task)? And do my bit for people and planet? Not to mention earning a living, bringing up children, being a companion to my partner, nurturing my friendships, doing my own creative things,--- and finding time to be genuine]y idle!

It's not surprising that there are workshops and manuals on time management, which teach many useful techniques. However, yet another external fix will not get to the heart of the matter. "Pursue the light and you will lose the source", as the old Zen poem has it. Inner work on time is valuable not only in order to step out of time-hassle. It is also a gateway to wider insight. The tighter the shoe pinches, the more potentially valuable is that point for awareness practice. And time-hassle is top grade meditation manure to sit with. Several peculiarities of time come to light.

We make time into a thing, which is somehow separate from "me". Consider the curious phraseology of time, like "I can spare you some of my time". This objectifying of time helps to define our identity, but at the cost of creating something. alien that has to be controlled. It is yet another of what William Blake called our "mind forged manacles". We may not have enough time to do some things we want to do and may have to spend too much time doing what we dislike. We may struggle quite hard to "make more time". Meditatively we become aware that time is shaped and colored by self-need, and doesn't exist "out there" in the way we felt it did. Time and being are one "time-being". The blooming and the withering of flowers is the passing of time. Moreover, there is no time other than now; the past and the future are only ideas. Sometimes "time stands still", in that we have momentarily ceased grasping after the upcoming future and lost touch with a self-confirming past. This is the absolute sense of time, but we must return to the relative, in time to catch our train. Thus we discover time-being as an identity of two dimensions: it passes from past through present to future, and yet there is always only the present in this passage-less passage of time. Time is real, but it is timeless. This is only a paradox when seen from the point of view of time passing, and is nicely expressed thus:

Understanding all this helps, but only the living experience of it liberates from time we who are time. There is only the unadorned suchness of time, which we can calibrate for our (and others') convenience so we get to the meeting promptly at 10 a.m. With practice and experience we move free]y in our new found sense of time=being, liberated back into time which is .just how it is. There is still only an hour to prepare the material for that meeting. Nothing has changed; everything has changed -- or at least we can now sense the possibility. An hour is still not long enough to do the job as well as we and others would like. So be it. But freed of pressurized anxiety we shall probably make a better job of it than we would once have done.

The liberating practice of awareness can be sharpened by experimenting with our daily and weekly ingrained and time-bound habits and attitudes. What does it feel like when we disconcert ourselves by abandoning familiar routines? Nothing too serious, of course. But what did a whole day of willful, premeditated, time-wasting idleness feel like, with so much left undone? A whole day to contemplate guilt! Did the heavens fall? Or did new possibilities emerge? Such playfulness can bring forth insight and self-compassion, may sometimes reveal new personal directions -- and is certainly good for a laugh.

Ken Jones is a founder and the present secretary of the UK Network of Engaged Buddhists. A long-standing Zen and Ch'an practitioner, he has authored The Social Face of Buddhism and Beyond Optimism: A Buddhist Political Ecology.