Six Hours to Love

Love in Rehabilitation Series : IV

There's 24 hours in a day. In all that time we are, as it were, assailed by all manner of concerns. In encountering them we realize the equal significance of each issue that makes for a day or week of activities. There's the career, friendships, family, housekeeping and then the proverbial me that is the common factor in all these. How much time do we give to me?

At the work place our concerns center around the skills that we bring to the job, the improvements that we can make and quite significantly our contribution to the way that work can be done better. The student at work becomes someday the master of the profession. Our relation to it is highly significant.

Our friendships convey to us a sensation of things we are leaving behind and that which we gravitate to. We are attentive to how it is letting go and the manner in which something new draws on our impulses. We understand the obligations, trust and its course of manner. It takes shape, destroys and then creates new vistas of itself.

In families we encounter a unique and rigorous sensation of issues. Its robust when it comes to affections and yet can be the most gentle naivety with regards to passions. Its possibly the largest canvas we encounter in our lives of issues that range from creation to the future of societies. We mix it with the housekeeping and our personal grooming and becomes in some way an extension of ourselves.

I figure that ¼ of the time we spent in a day is attributed to measuring and evaluating our involvement in the issues. We do it on the commuter, at the drinking fountain, at lunch, tea, in the garden and that book we are reading before bed. Where we add that to find a total of 6 hours in a day, would that satisfy us as sufficient attention we give to ourselves? The Oriental does za-zen after work for a specific time each night before going to bed.

And sometimes we reach for something entirely new. That billboard, something a friend said, a new fashion, new bestseller, a magazine cover … each conveys a feeling of the way we are cruising in a society and environment we are identified with. It makes us wonder … and at the risk of being repetitive we ask … did we know and then bring ourselves to do what we wanted or are we working at achieving something we never knew before? ...  I think 6 hours a day is good.