A long time ago, a song writer named Jimmy Dorsey said:
Time was when we had fun
On the school yard swings
When we exchanged graduation rings
One lovely yesterday
Time was when we wrote
Love letters in the sand
Or lingered over our “coffee and”;
Dreaming the time away
Picnics and hay rides and mid-winter
Sleigh rides and never apart
Hikes in the country and
There’s more than one tree
On which I’ve a place in your heart
Darling, every tomorrow will be complete
If all our moments are half as sweet
As all our time was then……
Time is both friend and foe. It brings us what we want and what we fear. Regardless of what we want and fear, time “marches on.” The “Persian Genius,” Omar Khayyám, may have said it best:
“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.”
I am fairly certain that everyone has said or done something (and probably many somethings) that they would take back if that were possible. One of the things from my youth I regret was what I said to a friend after we had had an argument. As he rode his bicycle away, he said, “See ya….” I replied, “Not if I see you first.” At the time, I thought it was a clever rejoinder without really thinking about what it implied. While I have a clear recollection of that instance, my guess is that i have had many similar instances of having said or done something that I would be glad to take back if that were possible.
Sometimes we can make amends, and sometimes we can’t. The moving finger has written, and time moves in one direction only: forward. As the songwriter Steve Miller said, “Time keeps on slippin’ into the future.”
The playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.” The ironic truth is that we don’t appreciate youth while we have it. When we are young, we often spend time wishing we were older when we would have more “privileges” and freedom. Then, when we are older, we spend time wishing we were younger, so we would have more energy and more to “look forward to.”
John Lennon is usually given credit for the saying, “Life is what happens while you are making other plans,” but the concept has a fairly extensive history. A philosopher named George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” My sense is that we tend to repeat past mistakes even when we do remember them. The “lure of the familiar” is a well-known concept. It is often more comfortable, for example, to return to a familiar restaurant than to go someplace new.
It seems to me that the most important thing is awareness: recognizing that everything is either a choice or the logical consequence of a choice. The moving finger writes, and there is no eraser. Time goes in one direction only, and the older we get, the faster the clock ticks faster with every passing year. Andrew Marvell said,”at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near” (See To His Coy Mistress. Even those of us without coy mistresses should probably be more aware of time’s chariot as it is always hurrying near….