Grief and emotional time — YouTube from the CEC Library

Suppose that you overload your life with activities, performing countless consecutive tasks without stopping. These activities are performed out of a compulsive and obsessive need. Imagine that you are busy and someone interrupts you. If you cannot calmly accept this interruption, it is a sign that you need to continue your work. This inability to stop reveals something important about us: the interruption breaks our continuity, causing a type of grief. Death, for example, is the loss of continuity of the physical body.

The same thing occurs when you expect a promotion and do not receive it; this also generates grief. To avoid this sense of loss, we always seek to do something, maintaining a continuity that assures us of our existence. We are always busy, moving from one task to another, which makes us productive and prevents criticism on the one hand. However, this excess of activities steals our emotional time. When we face difficulties, we fill our time with work, both during the day and at night in our dreams. Consequently, no time remains to listen to others or dedicate ourselves to something different.

This behavior is closely connected to the concept of emotional time. By eliminating our emotional time, we are left without room to live fully. As a consequence, we are always irritated by interruptions and have time for no one, including ourselves. Our satisfaction becomes fragmented. When we can perform an activity with complete attention and are interrupted without becoming bothered, we are creating a space of emotional time. This time is essential to living better because, without emotional time, your life has no time.