A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

Assumptions suck. They’re like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

“Flotsam is accidental, stuff found floating at sea. Jetsam’s been jettisoned. It’s a matter of intent. So you’re right, maybe this is jetsam.” He

And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?

How do you search for lost time, anyway?

ronin, which is an old word for a samurai warrior

After the temple, Dad would walk me to school and we’d talk about stuff. I don’t remember exactly what, and it didn’t matter. The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.

explicates the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099,980 moments40 that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will.

and after watching him I understand that you have to take care of your mind, even if it’s not a great one, because if you don’t, you can wind up with your head on the tracks.

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention?

Honestly, I haven’t met very many adults in my life who I could call really grown up, but maybe that’s because I lived in California, where all my friends’ parents seemed really immature. They were all in therapy, and always going to personal growth seminars and human potential retreats, and they’d come back with these crazy new theories and diets and vitamins and visualizations and rituals and relationship skills that they tried to inflict on their kids in order to build their self-esteem.

“My whole life is a nap. I need to wake up.

still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.

Sitting zazen, washing freezer bags, same thing, she said.

When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise.

‘A knowledge or sense of right and wrong, with a compulsion to do right.

Fiction had its own time and logic. That was its power.

“The eternal now,” he said. “She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point.” “Of writing?” “Or suicide.

“Think about it. Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life.

“The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.

What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting?

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It

‘Quantum information is like the information of a dream,’ ” he said. “ ‘We can’t show it to others, and when we try to describe it we change the memory of it.