Time, Presence, and Awareness: Quotations for Reflection and Discussion
published November 9, 2024
Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash
by Catharine Hannay, founder of MindfulTeachers.org
Here are a variety of perspectives on the passing of time and the challenges of staying present.
As with the other Quotations for Teaching Mindfulness, I don’t necessarily recommend giving this whole list to your students—I like to provide a lot of options so you can choose what’s most appropriate for your particular context.
Scroll to the bottom of the post for questions that can be used for personal reflection or as prompts for discussion and writing.
The Passing of Time
“Life is indeed ‘momentous,’ created by accumulated moments.”
Fr. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. xi
“Oh, there’s a moment coming.
There’s a moment coming.
It’s not here yet.
It’s on the way.
It’s still in the future.
Here it is!
Oh, it’s gone.
There’s no present. Everything is the near future and the recent past.
No wonder we can’t get anything together. We have no time.”
George Carlin, “NBC’s Saturday Night” (Saturday Night Live), Oct. 11, 1975
“Even the words that we are speaking now
thieving time
has stolen away
and nothing can return.”
Horace, quoted in The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, p. 1
“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these.”
—Paul Harvey (radio commentator), quoted in 25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way by Geraldine Woods, p. 152
Awareness of the Present Moment
“What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future,
or lives in the future and longs for the past?”
Mark Strand, “No Words Can Describe It,” from Almost Invisible, p. 37
“I felt that surge of unreasoning happiness that comes in childhood and, if you’re lucky, now and again in your adult life when you know you’re exactly where you want to be, doing exactly what you want to do.”
Gillian Linscott, Absent Friends, p. 172
“Multitasking: in an accelerated, overachieving world, we all take pride in our ability to do two or more things at the same time: working on vacation; using an elegant dinner to hammer out a business deal; reading while groaning on the Stairmaster.
The irony of multitasking is that it’s exhausting: When you’re doing two things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. […] In the words of T.S. Eliot, you’re ‘distracted from distractions by distractions.’”
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit, p. 26
“Instead of accepting what is (which doesn’t mean you have to like it), you bleed energy rejecting and resisting the reality of the situation you are currently in.”
Katherine Morgan Shafler, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, p. 90:
“Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear but around in awareness.”
James Thurber
Time and Mortality
“Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life.”
Fr. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. xxxvi
“If we are to save the planet, we might have to consider the difference between valuing the immortally frozen (plastic, visual images on screens, money) and valuing the mortally mutable (plants, animals, us).
One wonders if our fear of death, which is to say decay and aging and limits on resources, might actually be what ironically causes our extinction, more than the usually cited sin of greed.”
Philippa Stanton, Conscious Creativity, p. 33
“All that each of us can do is live in the now that is given. We cannot rush the process, we can only carry out each stage of our lives to the best of our ability.”
Fr. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. 24
(I’ve include links to the book title just to give you more information about the sources of these quotes. Mindful Teachers does not accept advertising of any kind and does not receive a fee if you purchase books mentioned on this site.)
Suggested Questions for Reflection and Discussion
You may want to use these questions for personal contemplation or to engage your students in discussion or reflective writing. (As always with personal topics, please respect your students' decisions about how much they choose to share with you or with the group.)
Which of these quotes resonates for you the most/the least?
Are there any quotes here that you don't agree with? Why?
What is your relationship to time?
How do you feel about multitasking?
Do you often find yourself ‘living in the past and longing for the future,
or living in the future and longing for the past?”
Have you ever experienced a moment that seemed to ‘stop time’?
Related Posts
Here at MindfulTeachers.org, there are many more thought-provoking quotations and other resources for teaching mindfulness, including the following posts: