Time

If there’s one nagging worry that permeates our lives more than any other I’d bet it’s the passage of time. Days, months, years, decades, gone — and where did they go? Despite the strong urge to stop time, or at least slow it down and recapture one’s life — forcing time to move at the tempo we demand of it — it cannot be done. We are reminded of time on birthdays and around the New Year, after the deaths of loved ones and the disappointments of faded dreams. We challenge ourselves to live differently and be more cognizant of time and how we spend it. But a reflection on time often seems to be detrimental rather than helpful or contemplative. It can increase sorrow and diminish hope. At its worse it can tie us up until we become almost accepting of the idea of simply letting the clock run out. If that’s the case, then the blows of time are doubled, though one is our own doing. Or undoing.

Indeed to reflect on time and become enmeshed in a world of regret and hypotheticals is one of the very worst things that can result. Regret has to be one of the most destructive emotions there is, especially when it amounts to brooding and nothing else. Emerson in his short poem “The Past” reminds us a bit of how time works and the futility of longing for what cannot be changed. “All is now secure and fast,” he says, “Not the gods can shake the Past.” Indeed there is nothing that will “Alter or mend eternal Fact.” So we must march on, look forward and not back, and become freed of what has happened in the past rather than stay miserably and foolishly bound to it.

But that is only part of it. A reflection on time and a commitment to the present seems also to need a revaluation of priorities, values, and commitments. Perhaps the sorrow and agony that often comes from reflecting on time stems partly from an awareness — albeit often in the back of our minds — that in order to feel better about time we must work on gravitating towards what is lasting and substantive in life and avoiding what is ephemeral and nothing but sad shadows of higher and better things (as Plato teaches us). This of course is one of the most difficult tasks there can be. But the futility of chasing after what is ultimately worthless will bring only gloom and agony in the end. We therefore have to learn to see things differently, opening our eyes to what is most important and beautiful and worth the time of our short-lived lives:

Beholding how each instant flies
So swift, that, as we count, ’tis gone
Beyond recover,
Let us resolve to be more wise
Than stake our future lot upon
What soon is over.

Jorge Manrique’s Coplas (trans. Thomas Walsh)