…by Hildur Jónsdóttir…
I have a problem with the term recovery. For many of us recovery implies that there once was a wholeness that was shattered through addiction, a wholeness that we need to recover, find again. I have toyed with the word restoration, but likewise, often there is little to restore. For many of us, our lives before addiction were never anything but shattered and disconnected. Yet this disconnection, these lives shattered, are the points of departure on our journey through life forward. Therefore we need to learn how to navigate from there, not back to a distant past, but to a future yet unknown to us.
Still, we have to come to terms with our past. We long for an understanding and for a meaning of our lives.
This writing is inspired by a fellow reader here who some months ago claimed in anguish: Do I have to continue to live with this shit? This shit in the basement that keeps thrusting its ugly head up into my consciousness here and now. My answer is yes. We have to live with the ogres from our past, named shame and guilt and regret and sorrow. But let me also share my contemplations on the concept of time.
I will start with an old parable from the Inuits in Greenland.
During the long, dark winter, when there is frost and snowfall, Inuits throw their waste in a heap outdoors, for it to be covered with snow in the next winter storm. A new layer of waste is added to the heap to be covered again, and then another and another. Each layer freezes into the same thick chunk 
of ice. When spring arrives, it is of no use to try to clear it up all at once. The only thing to do is to let each layer appear one after another as the higher chunk thaws. So one layer thaws and is cleared away, then another, then another. No one can force their way prematurely to the bottom of the heap, but they can rest assured that every layer will finally be revealed and dealt with.
This parable corresponds beautifully with the Inuit concept of time. I have come to understand this. From the birth of man and consciousness, in earlier agricultural societies, time was circular. The rhythm of life was cyclical, from the beginning of life in spring through growth, harvest and finally death. Death was followed by rebirth, for nature and for man. The cycle would start all over again. The industrial revolution changed our concept of time, nature did not dictate it any more, but production lines did. Time became linear, just like production and progress. Peak performance was always in demand. Be productive! Act now! Consume now! Be happy now! And be greedy!
This is not to be mixed up with the concept of here-and-now as in mindfulness and meditation. These do not demand peak performance, instant happiness or suppression of emotions. Just attention – and time to be present.
The old Inuit concept of time sees no time spent, no time wasted, no time gone. Time arrives. Time only arrives. Each and every moment we receive the gift of time to be added to all the gifts of time already received. Yes, nature is cyclical, yet still unpredictable; the variations in weather, the movements of the sea animals and of the ice are never exactly the same. Nature asks of you only attention and time.
We amass abundance of time, a growing wealth of time. But time also uncovers what came before, allowing us to deal with it. Time will arrive and thaw the stiff and icy chunk of your past. And with your attention and readiness you will deal with everything that the thawing reveals, loosens and presents to you. Not all at once. Layer by layer.
The impact of this on my thinking and my relationship with my past is profound. Nothing in my life, in my traumas and experiences, in my relations to people, is ever going away. Nothing is lost and nothing is forgotten. I have nothing to “get over.” Everything is there, intact, ready to be added to, interpreted and reinterpreted, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. I can roam freely in my limitless treasure chest of time that reaches beyond my own physical limitations – and keep the lid open for it to receive the new gifts of time that keep coming to me.
My past, my amassed time, is therefore both intact but also constantly recreated. Because now I have the power of attention. I have the power to examine what all this once meant to me, but I also have the power to 
change what all this means to me now. I have gained an insight that I would almost call spiritual, where even my ancestors and the story of my extended and immediate family belong. And where all of you (in this community) belong. Instead of disconnection there is now connection, over space and over time. There is, in each moment, attention, time and power to grow.
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