Space, time, and how to feel powerful

What is space-time, why do we feel like we never have enough of it, and how do we happily work what we have?

When we feel the optimal balance of space and time, we feel our best: abundant, focused energy, and the positive enthusiasm of working towards what we love. Too much space, too much time, too much work are all as problematic as too little of these. What we need is just-enough; usually, what we want is more. The inner work is to become sensitive to what is greed/desire, and what is good and necessary, beautiful and true. The outer work is to channel your inner power, positively.

What happens when we have too much? This is a modern problem, an affluence that spills into overabundance.

With too much space, we unwind physically, lose structure, and in the mind, we become lost. Our energy is diffuse, without a sense of direction or compression.

With too much time, we become listless, lingering over what may or may not be important, uninspired to move onwards towards a desired future.

With too much work, we generate nonsense, unable to process correctly. The same is true when we have too little work: we generate nonsense, unable to discern what is of importance because the sense of purpose, intention, is below our perceptual threshold.

With too little time, we rush our actions, feel impatient and grasp at the illusory perception of scarcity.

With too little space, we feel closed in, anxious, and without a sense of space, we are unable to see what is in the space, unable to perceive the emptiness that is always present, and are too willing to ignore the importance of what is present.

As in Goldilocks, there is a “just right.”

With just enough work, we are able to process the raw materials well, sift the real from the unreal, and apply ourselves with focus.

With just enough time, we savor what we experience, and are brisk in our actions.

With just enough space, we feel the room to breathe, able to see our resources and use them well.

Most of this is an illusion that the mind plays upon itself, a reflection of mental health. The discernment we make between too much and too little is arbitrary yet has profound impact on our experience and quality of life.

So what is real? Energy is real; work is real. On some scale time is real. Speed is real, especially when you have deadlines. All of these concepts come together concretely as power.

Power, in physics, is defined as work over delta time; force times velocity, which is also force times distance over time. We are looking at power aaa the amount of energy transferred.

We feel best when we feel power: an abundance of good energy directed effectively in a positive direction, towards the work we find meaningful and for the well being of the people we love. So how do we increase our inner power? We increase the tops of the equations (work; force; speed; distance) and we decrease the bottom (time). You can take this as working harder, faster, in less time, but that sounds stressful. There is a better way, and that is to reduce friction, anything that impedes the ease of your work (which is force times distance). With little to no friction, the minimal force you apply will travel maximum distance.

Sources of friction are idiosyncratic and often also generated by the mind: inner conflict; discrepancy between action and beliefs; escapism; self-doubt; drama, etc. When you reduce these sources of friction, you are single minded, clear in purpose, and effective in both thought and action. Then you need less time to do what you need to do, and more time to savor and enjoy your life. There will be easy effort in the application of your energy to your work.

There will still be times that you need to generate an explosive jolt of power, for example, when you are looking to make a change in your body-mind life. Then you need energy of activation, which can be self generated (drawing from your inner reserves of energy), or extrinsic (pulling from an external source/ the cosmic source). When we feel that these two are linked, that we are internally connected to our external world, then we feel charged with an undrainable energy.