To wish upon a (shooting) star

A 48th birthday post, musings on the nature of time and an audacious request for you

“How we spend out days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

– Annie Dillard in The Writing Life

At 3.30am this morning I was in the garden, hot tea in hand, face to the sky. It is my 48^th birthday today, and I couldn’t think of a better way to begin it than by watching for the Eta Aquariid meteor shower in the dark. By 4.15am my eyes had adjusted and I had seen eleven meteors unzip the sky. By 4.30am, as the horizon lightened and birds began to call, I was joined in the garden by my children, sleepy but eager to wish upon a shooting star.¹

Happy birthday, Mummy, one said. What do you wish for this year?

I have been thinking about her question all day long. I thought about it as Mr K presented me with two magnolia trees, and I learned that magnolias have been around for 100 million years. (Apparently, in the time of the dinosaurs there were not yet any bees, so prehistoric beetles did the job of pollination).

I thought about it as we drank slow coffee and made some maybe-plans in a sweet town by the water while the girls were at school.

I thought about it as we talked all about the itinerary for my upcoming Japan trip, and I shared a dilemma I have in one part of it, where I am wavering between one of the places I probably should go to (for secret project research), and the architect-designed onsen I really want to go to, and Mr K looked at me and laughed: Obviously you should go to the amazing hot spring, he said.

And as I felt my bones heat with imagined spring water, my mind relaxed and leapt the oceans to Eiheiji, the Temple of Eternal Peace, where not so long ago I had been pondering the true nature of time². A memory bubbled up – perhaps the perfect one as I embark on a new circle round the sun.

I remembered how I had travelled to Eiheiji to learn more about the work of Zen Master Dōgen, whose work I have been studying, to limited effect, for more than a couple of decades, and who founded both Eiheiji and the Sōtō school of Japanese Zen back in the thirteenth century. Dōgen is perhaps the single most influential teacher in the history of Zen. His core message is simple: life is happening here and now, and each moment is an opportunity to wake up. And yet, the intricacies of his teachings are complex, particularly as they relate to the nature of time. Even native speakers struggle with his ideas, and there exist volumes of translations from Dōgen’s original texts into contemporary Japanese, never mind into myriad other languages.

Eiheiji is spread over a hillside in rural Fukui Prefecture, and surrounded by a forest of ancient cedar trees. Many of its buildings are joined by a series of long corridors and covered wooden staircases, open at the sides to take in the weather and the surrounding garden.

In this particular memory I had just taken a seat on a bench at the back of one of the temple’s main halls. I reached into my backpack and pulled out a commentary on Uji, Dōgen’s major teaching on the nature of time. Uji was written in 1240 when Dōgen was forty years old.

Uji can be found in Dōgen’s masterwork Shōbōgenzō, which is said to contain some of the most important teachings in all of Zen. Of all the fascicles of Shōbōgenzō, Uji is the one that has always intrigued me the most. Even the title is curious. It is written 有時, using characters representing the verb ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’ (有) and the noun ‘time’ (時). Under normal circumstances the combination 有時 might be read ‘yūji’ or ‘arutoki’ and can variously mean things such as ‘at a certain time’, ‘sometimes’, ‘once’ or ‘there is a time’, referring to a specific and limited period of time. But the same combination of characters rendered by Dōgen with the reading of ‘uji’ means something else entirely.

Uji has been translated in many ways by many scholars, but the simplest and perhaps most potent translation is ‘being-time’. Another popular version is ‘for the time being’, which, for Dōgen, encompasses all states of existence-time – the entire universe in a moment.

In Uji³, Dōgen says:

An old master named Yaoshan said:

‘For the time being standing on top of the highest peak, just being-time.

For the time being moving along the bottom of the deepest sea, being time.

… In this word “being-time,” time is already just being, and all being is time.’

According to this master teaching, existence and time are not separate. That means…

We are time.

Think about that for a minute. We talk about time as a thing, something separate from ourselves that moves like an object: time flies. An hour drags. A decade is gone in a flash. We treat time as something we can spend, waste or negotiate. Make time. Save time. Buy time. Spare time. But what if time and existence are the same thing? What if we are not separate from time?

This is at once immensely complex and beautifully simple. ‘Wasting time’ becomes wasting our own existence. ‘Making time’ becomes creating our own life out of what really matters. ‘Killing time’ is unspeakable. And ‘time is money’, laughable. Dōgen’s teaching makes me question why we so casually give our time away.

Because clock time pervades all aspects of modern life, it is easy to forget that it is simply a clever human construct which fixes a framework to our lives. One might call it ‘doing-time’. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase ‘doing time’ is also English slang for ‘being in prison’. There is no doubt linear time can be helpful for functioning in society, but perhaps it is also a distraction from the truth of the eternal now, which sees our lives as a constant flow of arising moments, each one precious and deserving of our full attention.

What if, as Dōgen suggests, there is such a thing as ‘being-time’, and that we are time-beings – beings made of time – and everything else that exists is a time-being too? What if each moment contains all the being-time of all time-beings – the past, the present, the future, all possibility, everything arising at once?

I remember how I got to this point in contemplating time and my head hurt from all the thinking, so I set off in search of a cup of tea. At Hakujukan, the lodge next to Eiheiji, I encountered a friendly nun with a kind, open face. I asked her a question, and we fell into easy conversation.

She confirmed that Shōbōgenzō is a kind of cosmology, a metaphysical study of the nature of the universe exploring ‘time’ beyond the scope of what most of us can comprehend, and that even though it was written in a different era, it is just as relevant today.

The nun gently cautioned me, When studying Dōgen you have to remember that he is not talking about the minute by minute scheduling of time that creates the illusion of this world of speed. He is talking about the vastness of time – the scope of a human lifespan, which is at once minuscule and unimaginably huge.

Dōgen wrote that there are 6,400,099,980 moments in a day⁴. No one seems to know where he got that figure from, but it makes the point that a moment is infinitesimally small. He said sixty five moments arise and disappear in the space of a finger snap, each moment over almost before it has begun. The actual duration is less important than the fact that it illustrates Dōgen’s ‘moment’ not as a span of time we can intellectually grasp, but one so short that in living it, we experience ‘time’ as something that flows in us, as we flow as it.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, writing eight hundred years after Dōgen, has put it this way: ‘If by “time” we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time. There is only that which exists in time.’⁵

The nun was a similar age to me, and I explained why I was there, and how I was seeking answers to questions about how to live so when I get to the end of my life and look back, I will know I lived it well.

Smiling, she said, ‘If you take care of the present moment, and give the now your full attention, it connects to both past and future. You can see that everything now has been born from the past, and everything now connects to the future. So, your job is to take care of now, as well as you can.’

The nun told me of her life before taking her vows, back when she had long hair and cute shoes. She said things were a lot easier now she was walking this path of sufficiency and contentment. She was no longer consumed by a lust for stuff, and her life was not a product of what she owned or did not own. There was not a line on her face, and when she laughed, which she did often, she seemed to glow.

I asked her how she made the decision to become a nun and she simply said, It was time.

But how do you know when it’s time for something so significant? I asked.

Follow the threads of connection, she counselled. Be where you have to be. Don’t force the answers. They will arrive, and you will know.

And so, as the memory faded and I returned to this day, my 48^th birthday, I made a vow to simple follow the threads of connection. To take care of the now, and fully inhabit each and every day.

When the girls came back from school, and skipped into the house, one of them asked, Did you decide your birthday wish yet?

Of course, I replied, but I can’t tell you or it won’t come true, will it?

Here is my actual birthday wish – the one I didn’t tell them about. It is that YOU share with me your finest wisdom, from all your time on this beautiful planet. Tell me friend, what should I know as I step into this shiny new year of my life? Please do share your most hard won lessons and most powerful teachings. I would love to know. What a beautiful birthday gift that would make.

Thank you for being part of my world. I appreciate you more than you will ever know.

Beth Xx

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1. Did you know ‘shooting stars’ are actually meteors? (This video from the European Space Station explains about them) but they look like an extended, supercharged version the way they shoot across the sky, fast, and for a long distance (millions of miles???) This is what Royal Museums Greenwich says about them, “Meteors are pieces of debris which enter our planet’s atmosphere at speeds of up to 70 kilometres per second, vaporising and causing the streaks of light we call meteors.” Also, “The beautiful streaks we see in the night sky can actually be caused by particles as small as a grain of sand!”

2. This is something I explored in my latest book Kokoro: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived

3. See The Zen Master’s Dance by Jundo Cohen (Somerville: Wisdom, 2020) p.119

4. The figure 6,400,099,980 moments is given in Shukke-Kudoku, one fascicle of Dōgen’s masterwork Shōbōgenzō. There are many translations available, but for example it can be found in Nishijima, Gudo & Cross, Chodo, (Trans.) Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo Book 4, (Tokyo: Windbell, 1999) p.122

5. Rovelli, Carlo, (trans. Segre, Erica and Carnell, Simon) The Order of Time (London: Penguin, 2018) p.92