Time is precious. Through awareness of our experience with time---that is, watching over our impulses that, unguarded, call us out of our heart's dwelling in real time---we taste of the life we would have known had we never sinned. Awareness of time is our vocation as the New Adam, the New Eve.
Fully aware of this present moment we stand in the presence of God in humility, love, and gratitude, desiring to live in yielded obedience rather than the slavery of self-rule.
I practice loving God alone---who alone satisfies, making every other thought as nothing. This is not rest, but leads to rest. It is in this practice that habits are formed, and from habits comes virtue---that inner freedom from all false loves to love the only thing that should be loved, God, in whom the relinquishment of all other things gives us Everything. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing calls this "forgetting." Julian of Norwich says that "we need to know the littleness of all created beings and set at nothing everything that is made," so we can love God "who is unmade."
I pray this way so that I may be so bound to God and not to myself and the lower loves. I pray this way so that as Julian also says, there may be "no created things between my God and me"---not even a single thought to cloud my vision of God's glory or shade my heart from God's love.
The path I follow in contemplation, the prayer of the heart, is not mere quietism. It is not transcendental meditation or emptying or relaxation. It certainly transcends. It does empty. And it may relax.
But it is active, in fact, it is warfare. It aims at the deepest from of asceticism---an interior renunciation. It aims to watch rising thoughts like a fly-fisherman watches fish. I take hold of thoughts before they lure me away and pull them down instead, toward Christ in my heart. I draw them in and down, following the breath.
In the presence of Christ, they give up their pretensions; they're made nothing in comparison to the Almighty.
"All time is given to you, it shall be asked of you how you have spent it." St. Anselm Watch, then, for "sin is lurking at your door; it's desire is for you---you must master it" (Genesis 4). Prayer is the holding of the heart in time (eternal time, God's time)when the soul is buffeted and even tormented and mauled by the beasts who want to drag you into space. How intoxicated we are with space---filling it up with stuff, things; conquering it, taming it.
You are to be concerned with time. Embracing it. Loving it. But the beasts will draw you out of time and into space, space that's increasingly crowded by obligations, demands, and tasks that will always keep you living from a sense of deficit, scarcity. You will be led to believe you don't have enough time to fill up this space. But you have all the time in the world. You have an abundance of time. Time cannot really be spent, it is eternal.
Anselm, I know what you're getting at, but don't talk about spending time.
We get to dance with time, make love to time. Prayer is this dance, the marriage bed of God.
If I can keep my mind active and busy with the clutter of competing and distracting thoughts that keep me unbalanced and focused on external matters, surely I can exercise the mind toward active, interior prayer that moves from psalms, prayers, and the recitation of the Jesus Prayer, to the prayer of the heart and watchfulness over my interior landscape. Surely, with God's help, I can trade the primitive "prayer" to the idols that seek my allegiance for prayer that anchors me in Jesus and unites me with the inner life of the Holy Trinity.
Surely, if I can "pray" unceasingly to such false gods, I can pray to the true God---for I have God's help and nothing pleases God more.