Life moves in only one direction: forward. There’s no going back, and there are no “do-overs.” That’s why we need to do the best we can with everything we do all the time. A long time ago, the Steve Miller Band said, “Time keeps on slippin’ into the future”:
Time is, in fact, a slippery slope. When we are young, the passage of time seems slow. You can probably remember one year in school that seemed to last forever. For me, that was third grade. With each passing year, however, the speed at which time seemed to be passing accelerated. By the time a person hits 60—or more—the rate at which time is passing seems increasingly supersonic.
Time is also a one-way street. There are “no do-overs.” You can apologize for something you said or did, but you can’t “undo” it. Do the best job you can the first time—and every time—because that is actually the only time. A long time ago, the poet Edward Fitzgerald translated the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,” (1859):
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
It is a hard lesson to learn. Learning that lesson is basically the purpose of childhood. What’s done can’t be undone. The only way to go is forward. We are told to Sin boldly….
I am not exactly sure what Martin Luther meant when he gave that advice, but it seems to imply that “sin” is inevitable. “Sin” in this sense refers to “mistakes.” Everyone makes them, so in that sense we are all “sinners.” Are some sins worse than others? I assume so, but while I have a vague sense of what actions are better or worse than others, I do not fully understand the variety of ways different people classify them.
Catholics, for example, have what they consider holy days of obligation, when church attendance (for Mass) is required. Christians in general reserve Sunday (the Sabbath) for religious observance. And, of course, Jews consider Saturday the
If you’re reading this, living when and where you probably do, you may well be thinking, “So what?” Take a minute, however, to consider how many people fought and died because they thought that one way of “being spiritual” was better than another. It is hard to say whether most wars in history were fought because of religious differences or whether religion was simply being used to justify wars fought for material gain.
So much of life depends on perspective. In general, people have been expanding their perspective over time. Someone Debra and I trained with, Richard Bandler, used to say, “I’m not myself—know more.” In some ways, that is what life is asking of all of us: We are supposed to “know more” as we go through life.
Life is, after all, a great adventure of learning and knowing more….