My year of timelessness

Meditation-induced time blindness and the limits of living in the present

by Takenami Otoha

One evening last July, I found myself sitting in an airport lounge in Dallas, Texas. I had just missed my connection to San Francisco on my way back from working a meditation retreat in Costa Rica and got booked on the next flight out in the morning. With all the stores and restaurants shuttered, there was nothing to do but wait, so I found a quiet carpeted nook with a gray leather lounge chair and plopped down.

I don’t remember much of that night. I think I did some journaling, listened to music, and reflected on the past week, but mostly I stared at the fluorescent tube lights above me in a state of reverie. The lights seemed to blur and dance, leaving trails behind them every time my eyes shifted slightly or relaxed out of focus. Tiny rainbows refracted off my lashes and the water in my eyes, and I watched those, too, as if they were part of a meticulously choreographed light show put on for a private audience. I remember crying because I found it beautiful.

Before I knew it, it was six in the morning. My flight would be boarding soon, so I collected my things and headed to the gate. I was tired since I had not slept, but a warm contentment filled my chest.

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This unusual incident had a cause: a few months prior, I had experienced a permanent shift as a result of meditation that upended my life. The result was overwhelmingly positive, but I struggled with adjusting after what felt like an existential and emotional atomic bomb had gone off. One of the effects I found particularly fascinating and challenging was my distortion of time.

I developed something similar to “time blindness” as mentioned by people with ADHD: trouble estimating how much time has elapsed, losing hours while deeply absorbed in tasks, and running late to appointments. But unlike their descriptions, I did not experience anxiety or shame about it. They seemed to yo-yo between being blissfully unaware of time and freaking out about it once they regained awareness because they feared how it affected their work or relationships. But for me it just felt nice.

Before, life was divided into “flow” and “not flow,” with the latter making up the majority of my experience. I could regularly induce flow through meditation, writing, nature, or good conversation, but it wasn’t the default state. Now it was, and the activities that used to induce flow would simply put me in even deeper flow. Even the most mundane things could capture my attention indefinitely until faced with external constraints (a party ending, a cafe closing) or my vitals demanding attention (food, sleep, water), but until those showed themselves, I found myself extremely absorbed with whatever was immediately in front of me with no concern for time.

My preoccupation with the present was so severe that it affected my short-term memory. The reason why I was late to parties was because while I was getting ready to go, I would forget that there was a party at all and that I was preparing to go to it. I would think: Okay, I need to be out of the door in twenty minutes. Then I’d go to the bathroom to wash my face so I could put on makeup, and then enjoy the feeling of the water on my face and hands so much it was all I could hold in my mind. I would catch myself remembering: Oh yeah, there’s a party. It’s at 7. I’m getting ready. I’m washing my face and then I need to get dressed. This would repeat at each step until I made it out the door.

A similar incident unfolded in the kitchen once, when my roommate and I were both preparing breakfast. I have a habit of eating half an avocado with my eggs every morning and refrigerating the other half, so I always check the fridge before opening one in case I have some from the previous day. That day, there was no avocado inside, so I opened one and put the rest in the fridge. Maybe a minute later, I opened the door again for an unrelated reason, saw the avocado inside, and said to my roommate, "Aw man, there was one here the whole time!”

He furrowed his brows and told me I had just put that in there. There was a long pause as I stared at him and blinked. When the realization hit me I started laughing. We couldn’t believe it.

Socializing got strange as well. I would go to parties and regularly have three-hour-long conversations with strangers because it felt effortless. Most of them were men, and this caused a bunch of misunderstandings where they thought I was romantically interested in them. This happened enough times that my friends learned to retrieve me if they saw me from across the room talking to someone long enough to give them the wrong idea.

I jokingly called this state being “gnomed up,” in reference to being a garden gnome, the mythical smiling creature that remains indefinitely wherever it is planted. I could post up anywhere and have a great time, experiencing whatever the opposite of boredom was.

Despite the drawbacks, it was liberating. The way I saw it, my previous awareness of time corresponded to a physical tension I held in my body at all times like a flexed muscle. Relaxing it was a relief, and a whole cluster of neuroses around time dropped away: worrying that someone would be disappointed in me if I came late to a party, worrying that I needed to be at my next appointment during a preceding one, worrying that I was “behind” in some sense and didn’t have enough time to do the things I wanted to do. Considering that most of my life had been dominated by work and school schedules I found suffocating, I was grateful to be relieved of this genre of concerns.

I experienced time as a flexible, sprawling object with a life of its own: sometimes it expanded and infinities passed in an afternoon, or days would zip by as if they had taken only an instant. What remained the same was how each present moment seemed to take the place of the one before it. As far as I was concerned, each moment had the same structure and only the contents changed like individual frames in a movie.

But at a certain point it got old. Not the moments themselves—no, each was beautiful and born anew. It was more like the movie of my life that I was watching had a boring plot that left some wishes unfulfilled. I could only take so many afternoons staying in cafes until close and conversations where I was left holding the thread before I realized I lived an off-beat existence that was beginning to cost me.

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I found my answer not in Buddhism, as one might expect, but in Christianity. In Confessions, the Catholic bishop Augustine of Hippo defines time as being made up of three presents: a present of things past (memory), a present of things present (attention), and a present of things future (expectation).

Because the past has gone and the future has not yet happened, only the present exists outside of us, but the human mind is stretched across all three. He calls this distentio animi, translated from Latin as “stretching or fragmentation of the soul,” and proposes we resolve this fragmentation through intentio—a gathered, directed attention toward God.

Now, I did not want to become a nun or monk. My spiritual practice was a cherished and significant part of my life, but I couldn’t see it as my primary vocation. But reading Augustine helped me realize where I had gone wrong: I did not have a central object of devotion in my life. I stopped stretching myself across the past and future, but I was not organized around something greater.

I talked to a friend who went through a similar change a few years ago, but his relationship to time wasn’t as distorted because it happened while he was in a Zen monastery where he had a rigid daily schedule and set of responsibilities. I, on the other hand, was a modern layperson who worked from home and spent a lot of time staring at clouds.

What, then, could be the central axis for my life to revolve around?

The answer came quickly, as if spring-loaded: my writing. The one invariant in my life, the bug I can’t shake off, the ritual I have engaged in daily for over a decade. The affliction that has me composing phrases in the shower and editing sentences as I fall asleep. I remember being so busy on the first meditation retreat I worked that I had no time to write; by the end of the week, I started experiencing withdrawal and stayed up drafting three essays. I remember standing next to the tennis courts in Dolores, furiously scribbling in my journal mid-walk as the sky darkened.

The more I looked into my past, the more I saw myself glued to a page. When I turned toward the future, I saw the same; the possibilities and challenges excited me. But the present did not reflect this awareness.

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by,” Annie Dillard wrote. Stranded in the present, I had overlooked the type of continuity that allows daily effort to compound into a life worth living.

The wingspan of the present is too narrow to sustain a deeply meaningful life. It is not sufficient to be relieved of our fragmentation. To reach into our unique pasts while glancing at the unactualized future is to balance the scale of the present and guide our actions. We look backward and forward not to grasp at regrets or future threats, but to stitch ourselves into the chronology of our own lives in a way that enables flight.

Once I committed to my writing, life lurched forward and started moving again. I regained the ability to arrive on time. I learned how to excuse myself from conversations. I came up with a posting schedule and created a process for my essays. I still can’t estimate time very well, but there are tools to help: calendars, timers, reminders. My days became infused with the urgency of excitement. And with the arrival of spring, my year of timelessness came to a close.

I reckon I will still see the beauty in those fluorescent lights, but next time I will admire them for only a few minutes before turning back to the page.