Chronos devours his son [1] To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, says the Qoheleth [2]. Believer or not, this book of wisdom is well worth reading…
Incommensurable experiences shattering one’s view of the world and hurting our values, irreconcilable circumstances, come to pass. When the wheels of History screech, when their time has come, ugly, oppressing powers prevail for years, even for entire generations; they seem eternal… for a while.
People have to live with their times, engage them, rise above them, or run away or perish. To make things worse, high values of goodness applied in excess, keep ending up inhuman and deadly, while bad intentions and vices, like greed, envy, anger and cowardice, often push people to do the right thing. To confuse me even more, I have met evil people who rescued me and good people who wronged me.
Virtuous hypocrisy will censor such statements as morally or logically or politically incorrect, yet, common sense and experience of life will know them to be true.
As I learned, you find yourself carrying on, in dissonance, through some coercive times. You cannot avoid painful choices between your own most cherished values; sincerity against prudence, well-being against achievement, justice against loyalty, truth against kindness. You store painful incidents and loss.
I had to grow through such times of the bullies, discordant with my deepest beliefs, I had to cope with absurdity. This, and not only dreams, is the stuff we people are made of.
*
If you long to be a better person, if the future counts to you, you must – for a start - survive the day and secure time to grow stronger, able to make a difference, be it the humblest one; the perished improve nothing, just rot.
But what to do with those vexing memories? Wash your hands? Repress them into oblivion?
In retrospect, I believe that disowning your bad times is as damaging as forgetting your errors instead of learning from them.... Expedient trashing deprives your of your past, makes you to lie to yourself, turn sour and corrupt; as if you twice wasted the unique times you lived, forbidden to visit them in your memory. Instead, if you acknowledge the value of all things undergone, you grow richer from the good and from the bad also.
*
It is precious for an entire person to remember, to seize, honour and store those kaleidoscopic times – the building blocks we are made of - lest we waste our life instead of living it long and fruitful. The Greek poet Constantin Cavafy wrote it so well :
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
...
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. [3]
Do not bounce empty handed from day to day, one season to another. Treasure your roots, your works and deeds and words; and your friends. And your dreams too! To be someone instead of just time spent, a puppet of times, do not throw away what your ancestors, what you have done and been, build on it, with constance, some future. Rise with the little you do now on the shoulders of what you did before. That, is living life instead of spending it.
There is a time for everything and it does not wait
Besides the load of inconvenient things happened, Time constrains us also with what does not happen when it should. Kairos, the wing-footed god of opportunity, carrier of the right time, does not call twice. Many duties, critical events and momentous decisions belong to the necessary seasons of our life, of human condition, wherever we are born or go. Without carrying out the normal episodes and parts of a life-story at their due time, life is wanting.
We seize those seasons or we fail them. For, there is a time for everything and it does not wait:
A time to dream and one to sweat your bread
A time to act, and one to pay for what you have done
A time to have and one to be
A time for doing things and one for allowing things to happen
A time to push and many times to pull
A time to take place and a time to leave space
A time of urgent wait and one of no delay
A time to say “we” and one to say “I”
A time to love and the sinister time to punish
A time to understand and a time to cover your face
A time to lie by mercy and one to call things what they are
A time to persist and one to amend swiftly
A time to eat, drink, be merry and time to build cathedrals
A time for certainty and a time for doubt
The time of listening, of silence, and the one of telling
A time to learn, which breeds the times to teach
A time to be a hope and one to prove who you are
A time to be different and a time to be like everybody else
A time to drift and one to take root
A time to remain a child and one to have children
A time of the Father and one of the Son becoming the Father
A time to be strong and a time to wane
A time to respect and one to be respected
A time for parting and a time to return
A time to trust and one to only trust yourself
A time to begin, to do your best, and one to draw a line
A time to live and a time to die.
So many times there are, and many, many more, but only one fleeting lifetime, relentless. We live it forwards and understand it backwards [4].
Ah, would I have known, I would have chosen better!
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[1] Saturn, Jupiter's father, devours one of his sons, Poseidon (1636-38, Peter Paul Rubens Museo Nacional del Prado, CC Wikimedia Commons) The deep meaning here is the old parent joke: When your children are small, they are so sweet, you would eat them. When they grow up you regret that you didn't. (:
[2] Known as Ecclesiastes. KJV Bible, Ecc 3:
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace…
[3] Constantin Cavafy, Ithaca, (1911) (C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992) fragments quoted from
http://www.cavafy.com/index.asp
[4] 'Life is to be understood backwards, but it is lived forwards', Søren Kierkegaard in Hong: KW I, From the Papers of One still Living, p. 78 and in Hong: KW VII, Philosophical Fragments, p.80. Also in: JP 1, A-E, entries 1030 and 1025. cf http://www.utas.edu.au/docs/humsoc/kierkegaard/resources/Kierkquotes.html
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