Thursday’s cancelled this week.

What? Isn’t (wasn’t…) that today…? Well, for you, in the USA, yes. But, for me, there is no Thursday this week. As this missive made its way to you, I was already in Friday.

I left Los Angeles late Wednesday night, and I arrive in Sydney, Australia, in time for brekky on Friday. I will have no experience of Thursday.

On my way back from New Zealand, after seeing my mother safely into her lovely new apartment, I’ll walk back through my New Orleans front door a scant 12 hours after I walk out my sister’s Christchurch front door.

According to the clock, anyway, but actually, of course, not. I’ll effectively have two Tuesdays.

Back in the ’80s I traveled between Los Angeles and New Zealand frequently. I was a TV producer, working for a New Zealand company, but living in West Hollywood (at the Chateau Marmont, if you must know).

One Christmas Day, the phone rang in my bungalow and it was my boyfriend in NZ, breaking up with me; to be fair, it was already Boxing Day in New Zealand, so it wasn’t as callous as it may sound.

I made a brief, impromptu trip back to Wellington in an attempt to dissuade him, but to no avail.

My return flight, by a cruel twist of fate (and because I booked it that way) took off just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. I sat in business class (as I did in those days), weeping piteously into my hankie, while the business men in their nice suits tried not to notice me.

“Another New Year’s Eve alone. Poor, poor me,” I thought to myself. We were served champagne to celebrate, but I used it to drown my sorrows, my tears dripping into the bubbles.

Fifteen hours and a headache later, we landed in Los Angeles, and I arrived back at my elegant, solitary bungalow at the Chateau just in time for a repeat performance – tears, champagne, self-pity. Another – like, really, ANOTHER – New Year’s Eve alone…

Like nearly everyone I know, I believe I don’t have enough time. There simply is not enough. My to-do lists languish unattended, I miss deadlines; it’s a rare day on which I feel I’ve used my time satisfactorily.

For a while I became very attached to iCal, and was constantly shuffling events, appointments and tasks – spending a great deal of time doing that, in fact. Trying to create more of what seemed like a finite resource.

But if this Thursday can simply fail to exist for me, then perhaps time is a lot more fluid and malleable than I imagine. Einstein certainly thought so.

Sometimes, these days, I function for a whole day on Pacific time, though I live in Central. I tell myself that it’s two hours earlier than the clock tells me it is. I am becoming pretty good at allowing the shift inside my psyche.

What I’m noticing is that when I do this – when clock time is not my master – I am better able to exist in the only time we ever have anyway – this moment, now.

But as Eckhart Tolle says, in “A New Earth” – “The elimination of time from your consciousness is the elimination of ego….we are speaking of the elimination of psychological time, which is the egoic mind’s endless preoccupation with past and future and its unwillingness to be one with life by living in alignment with…the present moment.”

So, call it Wednesday, Thursday or Friday – it doesn’t matter. Time is not a constant.

The paradox is that everything seems to be subject to time, yet everything happens in the Now.

So, now – yes, now, as you read this – take a moment to consider the idea that there is only, ever, THIS MOMENT.