Time is revealing itself more and more to be the illusion that it truly is.
Are my days passing quickly or slowly? Both, simultaneously. How? I don’t know.
I have been worrying that time has been slipping through my fingers before I can use it, but when I look back at how much time has passed, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I am fitting enough experience into my days that living feels worthwhile. Yet still I enjoy that sense of time flowing past me relentlessly, refreshingly, sculpting my environment into something slightly different from what it was a moment before.
I don’t feel stagnant. I don’t feel rushed.
Now, if we put the physical matter of my life out on the table, we will probably see that I am not appropriately attending to all of it in the manner that one would hope for. I have deprioritised some things that the executive within me is wanting to get back on the schedule post-haste.
‘Executive function’ is an interesting part of cognitive psychology.
I have spent quite a lot of time reading papers about ADHD over the past few months, and it is perhaps best described as a problem with executive function. Which is, very basically, cognitive control. While it’s categorised by most psychological professionals as an impairment – a disorder – many ‘sufferers’ are actually pleased they have it. Hmm.
There is a movement within psychology to embrace ‘neurodiversity’. Some brains are different. Not disordered. This isn’t just about equal rights or removing stigma – if we accept there may be an upside to conditions that we’d previously discounted as deleterious, we might just fucking learn a thing or two.
What if our inner executive is making the wrong calls? What if he let his ego get in the way and is issuing orders according to a faulty plan? What if he’s using bad information?
What if there’s a higher, wiser power? What if we remove the gatekeeper? What if we can bypass the corrupt executive and glide up right to the source of what we need to know?
What if ADHD makes it harder to live out of alignment, but easier to live in alignment? I wonder.