How do you see time? Is time your enemy or your friend?
Time and tide wait for no one
I’m strapped for time
Time flies
Time just passed me by
Time is money
Time is the greatest healer
Many of the common sayings and proverbs we use in talking about time suggest its tyrannical nature. And its preciousness. Depending on how we look at it. Depending on what’s going on in our lives…
For many a parent on the verge of ‘losing’ their young adult to university or work or early marriage, (if you ask me, any marriage undertaken by under 25s is early!) time can seem to be an enemy. When were they little babes in arms, then toddlers? It feels like only a couple of yesterdays ago! Now they are all grown up and leaving home. Where did the time go, the parent wonders, when did they get all grown up so?
I do not know what the answer to that is. Neither do I know fully whether time is my friend or my enemy – I am still in the process of figuring that out. What I do know is that it has been both.
There has been a period when the mention of my age brought me so much angst. Because, on the one hand, I am grateful to be alive and growing older, gracefully… On the other I have also felt that time has passed me by, that I had been trapped in time and indeed, derailed by certain circumstances in my life, and of course had lost precious time that can never be regained . . .
And so I yearned for lost time.
And grieved the fact that time had not waited for me, that I had been strapped and that time had flown away. And so I groaned at the platitude that time is the greatest healer.
Yet, healing can come… in time.
I still do not think that time on its own is the greatest healer. I believe that other elements (such as healing relationships for instance) must synergize with time to birth a healing process.
What I do know now though is that the passing of time is not necessarily bad; that indeed it can be good. As, just like the tide that ebbs and flows and takes and brings in its rhythmic waves, in the mystery of the flow of time and seasons, there can be a taking, and a bringing; a shedding and a renewing; a dying and a rebirthing that all happens in the undulating sequences of time.
Time, by its very nature, suggests that nothing – no circumstance, no experience, no situation – is set in stone and that everything is subject to the tyranny – or benevolence – of time.
What about you? How do you see time – as a friend or a foe?
