It is September.
Summer is coming to an end, and somehow I find myself thinking about time.
The beginning of the year does not seem very far away. January, February, spring, summer—and suddenly September is here.
A few years ago, I turned fifty.
I don’t remember experiencing it as a dramatic event. There was no sudden revelation, no crisis. But something gradually changed in the way I thought about time.
When I was younger, there always seemed to be plenty of it.
I could do something next year.
Or in five years.
Or one day.
There was always a sense of later.
Now, occasionally, another thought appears:
Make the most of it before time slips away.
There is nothing particularly unusual about this. As we get older, we become more aware that our time is limited.
But there is something strange about the way we experience it.
We talk about time as if it were something flowing past us.
We stand on the bank while the river moves.
Another day gone.
Another month gone.
Another year gone.
And eventually we begin to worry about how much river is left.
But Dōgen, in Uji—usually translated as Being-Time—points towards something rather different.
Perhaps we are not standing beside the river.
Perhaps we are the river.
For Dōgen, being and time are not two separate things. We do not first exist and then move through time.
Our existence is time.
This moment is not simply a point between a past that has disappeared and a future that has not yet arrived.
It is our life.
Right here.
This breath.
This sound.
This body sitting here.
When I think about time in the ordinary way, September at fifty can seem very different from April at twenty.
At twenty, the road ahead appeared almost endless.
At fifty, I can find myself looking towards the horizon and wondering how much road remains.
But practice keeps bringing me back from the horizon.
To this step.
This breath.
This moment.
Not because the future does not matter.
Not because we should pretend that ageing and death do not exist.
But because the future is never where life is actually happening.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time living in later.
Later I will relax.
Later I will practise properly.
Later I will do the things that matter.
Later I will have more time.
And then, strangely, later keeps becoming now.
Dōgen’s Uji challenges the idea that this moment is merely something we have to get through on the way to another one.
When walking, there is this step.
When breathing, there is this breath.
When washing a bowl, there is the bowl, the water, the hands.
Nothing needs to be added.
This does not mean trying to freeze the present.
The river still flows.
Things change.
Bodies age.
People appear and disappear from our lives.
Summer becomes autumn.
But perhaps the problem is not that time passes.
Perhaps the problem begins when we imagine ourselves standing outside it, watching our life disappear downstream.
Practice brings us back into the river.
Not as an idea.
Not as a philosophy.
Simply here.
Sometimes, when I notice myself thinking about how much time I have left, I try to remember this.
I do not know how much road remains.
None of us does.
But this part of the road is here.
And I am already travelling it.
This is not rehearsal.
This is not the waiting room for some future life in which everything will finally be in place.
This is it.
September.
This breath.
This moment.
The river is moving.
And we are not standing on the bank.
