The title of my article for this month comes from a song popular in the 1950s, “Time Was”:
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
And there was indeed a time of at least relative innocence and tranquility as depicted in the song, which was written and popular in the lingering shadow of World War II. Although I was still a child, I can remember what life was like in the 1950s. We—both adults and children—were (at least in general) more innocent then. The country had just been through World War II and the Korean War, and we were eager for a more peaceful life. We had barely settled in to a relatively peaceful time when the Vietnam War required our attention.
Humans have a tendency to look to both the past and the future in search of an ideal time, when things were peaceful and people were happy. A long time ago, Morris Massy recognized the way people are forever influenced by what they experienced in childhood. That is neither good nor bad, it “just is.”
A well-worn phrase is, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” It is, however, a bit misleading. Life moves in one direction: forward. A well-known saying about this comes from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of “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.
John Lennon is usually given credit for the saying, Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, which is basically an iteration of the “moving finger.” Most people most of the time do not think in terms of their lives having direction and velocity. We—all of us—are moving “forward” at the same rate of speed.
Although we have no influence over how quickly the years go by, we have reasonably decent control over how we spend the time. In general, that changes over time. When I was young, I used to enjoy spending time at the beach (I grew up in California, not far from the Pacific Ocean). At this point in my life, I would consider that a “waste” of time. The “moving finger” is always writing. Because we can’t go back to “cancel half a line,” we need to make good decisions about what we are “writing.”
This is not to say that rest and relaxation are “wasting” time. There are times, of course, when resting and relaxing are the best thing you can do, not only for yourself, but also for others. The important thing, it seems to me, is awareness. Where is the focus of your attention? I think it is important to be aware that the “moving finger” is always writing whether we are paying attention or not. A long time ago a speaker at a workshop I attended turned to the audience and said, “The next 5 minutes are yours. Use them well.” Only a few in the audience recognized that what he said was essentially a joke, as we had expected the speaker to “speak.” He did, of course, resume his talk by commenting on the ways people use time, including our response to his having said that the next 5 minutes were ours.
People (you, me, everyone) are using time all the time. We have no choice. I suspect that’s true even after death—but that’s a subject for another article. Meanwhile, from time to time think about the “moving finger” of your own life. This is not to say that rest and relaxation are a waste of time. They are actually an essential activity. The most important thing, it seems to me, is your awareness of what you are doing and why you are doing it.
So … the next five minutes are yours. Use them well.