There is the time on our calendars, and then there is the other kind of time.
Two of my favourite thinkers arrive here from very different directions, one a surrealist painter, the other a spiritual teacher, and somehow they meet at the same point.
Salvador Dalí knew this intuitively, in The Persistence of Memory, clocks droop and melt over a barren landscape. These clocks don’t stop, they just lose their authority.
Time, Dalí seemed to be saying, is not the rigid ruler we take it to be. It bends, and melts. It becomes something else entirely depending on where we are inside ourselves. I have returned to that painting many times over the years. It unsettles something in a useful way.
Michael Singer arrives at the same place through a different door. His book The Untethered Soul is the one I have gifted most often, and every time I read it myself, I find something I did not see before. His work on consciousness and the inner life points to a quality of time that sits beneath the noise of the mind, simply here. Singer would say this is our natural state, the one we return to when we stop fighting with what is in front of us. It is what remains, not something we manufacture.
There are two kinds of time available to us:
- Clock time – the time that runs the diary, the quarter, the year, the time that measures and demands.
- The other kind is the one both Dalí and Singer are pointing towards – the inner time.
This inner time does not expand our schedules, nor it gives more hours. What it does is change the quality of the hours we have.
I have noticed this in retreat spaces, on long walks, in the middle of a coaching conversation that suddenly goes somewhere unexpected. There is a moment when clock time melts and something slower, wider, and more spacious takes its place.
Still in the same hour, but it is experienced differently.
Dalí’s melting clocks are an invitation. What would it mean to loosen the grip on the clock, and hold it more lightly? To let some part of our day be less measured and more lived?
This is what I mean by time within time. It’s not a productivity hack, but a different relationship with the present moment, one where we are actually in it, rather than rushing through it toward the next thing.
It is available to each of us & it always has been. The question is whether we are willing to let our clocks melt, just a little and feel the warmth of the melting moment.
