Having recently passed the milestone of my 35th year, I've been identifying with Dante Alighieri, who, at 35, began his opus with the words "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost." Not wanting to depart too far from the straight path, I have been pondering some of life's difficult problems more seriously. Chief among these is Time, along with his prime minister, Death. Here is some of what I have come up with thus far:

Time passes, and it never stops. In Gurdjieff's All & Everything time is called the "Merciless Heropass," the unstoppable eroder of even the most powerful men, their legions and fortifications. Youth, strength, and wealth are worn away by time's flow, which carries on its gently flapping, flying wings the harsh effectors of doom. Take a look at the relics of past epochs. However they are built to endure they show the signs of inevitable degradation!

Though we wish for immortality, we consider it a pipe-dream of the chillum-smoking yogis and religious dogmatists. The degeneration and death of the body—the part of our instrument with which most of us are most identified—is inevitable. If anything eludes the heropass it surely is finer than flesh.

We have contrived rhythmic devices such as clocks to overlay a predictable measure on time. Meanwhile, the actual experience is manifestly subjective. Says Beelzebub, "[Time] alone can be called and extolled as the Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon." We experience it only as a measure of the flow of experiences through our instrument. For instance, we can all agree that "time flies when you're having fun." Why? Because fun represents a concentration of impressions and experiences. Conversely time drags when there is a shortage of stimulation and experiences, and we become bored.

Time not only passes. It flows. It is a river that flows through all matter. We experience it as an artery with tributaries that flow through our tripartite perceptive instrument as thought, feeling, and sensation. The flow is sometimes furious and turbulent, and sometimes placid. Sometimes it even begins to stagnate and our inner life becomes a stinky psychic swamp, but it is not over speed of the flow that I am concerned. Given, there are practitioners of meditation that advocate for slowing down the subjective flow of time by sitting very still, quelling thought, and conserving experience. Rather, my point is that we can dangle our tackle in the stream of this experience and fish out something for ourselves; a something that accumulates, and remains fresh even as the body wears out.

Without fishing for insight in the river of experience, that experience will wear out our inner lives the same way it wears out the body. We will become dull, senile, premature victims of Alzheimer's.

[Insert humble qualifier here], there are two aspects to this fishing:

The first requires that we be conscious of ourselves as an experience flows in us. This is self-remembering—the two-pronged awareness in which the attention goes "out" and "in" simultaneously (I use quotation marks because there really is only our inner experience, though we differentiate between material harvested by the senses and that which arises associatively from the repository of memory).

The second requirement for extracting insight and energy from experience is to always be in a disposition of learning. And to exercise the capacity to learn every day, and in three ways. That is to learn something in each of the three realms of intellectual, emotional, and physical experience. For example, read a book to gain knowledge, play a musical instrument to exercise the feeling capacity, and train bodily in sports, dance, physical work.

The most important part of both of these efforts is their intentionality. For in general, as time passes and experience flows through us, we are carried on its current, reacting to requirements and bob-bob-bobbing down the stream of time. Rarely do we need to do something totally, intentionally for ourselves—for the sake of extracting something enduring.

Time is the unique subjective phenomenon. And yet swimming in it is the material to build something of objective value. Go fishing! Take your time, so your time doesn't take you. And the next time someone asks if you have the time, you will honestly be able to answer, yes.

—Jason Stern