The exercise took twelve minutes. He guided the group through holding two moments, one from the past, one from the future, simultaneously in attention. Not switching between them. Holding both. The instruction was simple and the execution was nearly impossible for most people in the first session. They kept slipping forward or back. The mind liked a direction.
By the third session most participants could hold both for thirty seconds or so before one of the moments collapsed. A few could hold for a minute. Waen had never told any of them that for him, there was no such thing as collapse, the two moments didn't compete, because all moments were already equidistant and always had been. He hadn't found a way to say this that didn't make the exercise feel impossible rather than achievable.
The workshops had been running for eleven years. He had designed them with a collaborator who had studied equidistant individuals for her doctoral work and was interested in whether the structural feature could be partially taught as an attentional practice. The answer was: partially, temporarily, with practice. People reported feeling less urgent about the future after several sessions. Some said they grieved differently, that losses felt present without becoming overwhelming in the way they had before. He couldn't verify this. He kept teaching.
At the end of the session, a woman who had been attending for six months asked him how long he had been teaching the practice.
"Eleven years, " he said. There was the half-beat of lag, the conversion. "Though I don't experience it as accumulation."
She looked at him carefully. She had been in enough sessions to understand what that meant. "You have it, " she said.
"Yes, " he said.
She considered this for a moment. "What's it like, teaching something you can't not do to people who have to work at it?"
He thought about this. He had been asked versions of it before and hadn't had an answer. "It's like teaching swimming, " he said, "to someone who has always lived underwater."
She nodded slowly. He wasn't sure if she understood. He wasn't sure he had explained it correctly. The eleven years were right there beside the session ending, equidistant, and he drove home through both of them at once.