living at the speed of light
from the series cosmiComedy
by lavinia plonka

“Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” Lewis Carroll – Through The Looking Glass

It’s Halloween and I’m at the Biltmore Estate, with its 250 rooms, 43 bathrooms, packed from floor to ceiling with precious art from Dürer to Renoir. The only problem is that I can’t see half if it. Around every corner is a Christmas tree. Forty-foot tall artificial trees block priceless medieval tapestries, plastic silver garlands hide ornately carved balconies.

The gift shop plays Christmas muzak. Ornaments, tinsel and holiday potpourris scream for purchase. I ask an employee, “Excuse me, why is everything decorated for Christmas?” She looks at me and smiles tolerantly.

“Well, Christmas season begins Nov 6.”

“Yes, but people come here to see the house, not Christmas decorations, right?” I don’t sound convincing.

“Thousands of visitors come here every year for the Christmas display.”

“On Halloween?”

“Oh yes,” she says, “Many people like to beat the rush. It gets so busy, we can barely pause for breath.”

I, on the other hand, am about to hyperventilate. Instead of enjoying the countless wonders before me, I begin composing my Christmas gift list. And a to-do list of social and marketing obligations that need to be addressed for the holiday season. And dreaded travel plans for that most difficult of weeks.

I stagger through Vanderbilt’s Shangri-La with glassy eyes; mentally reminding myself to check my light strands, trying to figure out when I can squeeze shopping in between teaching and cleaning my yard of the fall leaves I haven’t touched yet, longing for the days when Christmas plans didn’t start till after Thanksgiving, before we were all so busy that even our children have date books and beepers, and, and, and….

In a minute, two months collapse. A blink of an eye and it’s Christmas. At the rate I’m going, it’s going to be spring and I haven’t even ordered my seeds for the garden. Forget the garden, I should be thinking about my 60th birthday party next decade, but no! No! I don’t have the time!

I suddenly realize that, like the Biltmore employee, I’ve stopped breathing. I exhale deeply and look around. The sun is setting over the estate’s magnificent grounds, casting glorious reds that compete with the autumn foliage. I almost missed it.
I always thought that traveling at the speed of light meant you enter some kind of a capsule and get catapulted deep into space, returning thousands of years later, not a day older, to a planet ruled by apes. I remember—I think it was 2001—seeing Keir Dullea’s face, all distorted and stressed as the capsule accelerated and then boom, he’s blissing out in warp time and we’re treated to the lilting strains of The Blue Danube.

I look at myself in the mirror. I’m looking a little stressed, perhaps accelerated. Someone snidely told me that it only seems like things are speeding up because I’m getting older. I’m not buying it. I see young parents worrying at the birth of their child that he might not get into the right pre-school. Five year olds are planning their stock portfolios. College kids are worrying about retirement. No, it’s not just me. We’re all accelerating towards the future.

There are sociologists theorizing that this freneticism is the result of the endless doubling of information. We are constantly bombarded by information that allows no time for reflection. Scientist and philospher Terence McKenna actually calculated that by Dec. 21, 2012, all information on the planet will double instantaneously, causing some kind of temporal implosion. Others feel that we are trying to keep up with the fast technologies we’ve invented. “Our biology is not evolving as fast as our technology” is a popular saying amongst futurists. (They have seen the future and it is FAST.)

We keep trying to get things to go faster–faster modems, faster planes and trains, faxes, email. We want to get there, be done, have it in hand. “No Waiting!” is a big selling point. Yet when we arrive, or it arrives, we’re not satisfied, we need the next thing. And everyone is complaining that things are going too fast.

Well I think the problem is that we’re not going fast enough. We should be living at the speed of light. After all, the theory is that when you reach the speed of light, time stops. You stay eternally young. You can even reverse time.

The brilliant astro-physicist David Bohm once said that, ”Matter is merely crystallized light.” Once light has stopped, become matter, it begins to decay.

If light is constantly traveling at the speed of light until it hits something called Lavinia, or The Statue of Liberty, or a Mazda Miata, then is it not possible that we are all being constantly transformed? If I’m being constantly created by light that is deciding to stop right here and become my short red hair and tattered blue jeans, then this moment, this very moment is my opportunity to stop time. If I am in the present moment, there is no past and future. Time has stopped. I’m living at the speed of light.

Jesus said, “….Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these…..”. If I just am here, the way a lily just is, is it actually possible that I wouldn’t need to worry? That….things might take care of themselves? Is it possible that by living at the speed of light, by stopping time, reality shifts? Could I have been missing the point all this time? I wonder what possible evolutionary value there is in worrying about the future and rehashing the past. Is there something Mother Nature doesn’t want us to see? Has she programmed worrying and regret into our brains so that we miss something very important taking place right now? Pascal once noted that we almost never think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.

I sit for a few moments, watching the last glorious reds fade over the horizon. There is no Christmas, there are no bills to pay, no deadlines to meet. Just now. Warp speed feels like no movement at all, until something in me puts on the brakes. Anxiety overtakes me like a speeding tractor trailer, grabs me by the neck and turns my head to look at my watch. I suddenly remember a call I was supposed to make; my mind starts planning dinner and worrying about whether my husband made reservations at the restaurant. All that’s left of the experience is a memory….the past, as I hurriedly run to my car and the future.

Lavinia slows down time by practicing and teaching The Feldenkrais Method®, an exquisitely delicious way of using gentle movement to relax, heal and learn.

[ laviniaplonka.com ]