It is never too much to reflect on time. We have passed the halfway point of January and we have eleven long months to go before the end of the year 2022. We are constantly suspended between the nostalgia of the past, now reduced to mere memory, and the uncertainty of a future not devoid of surprises, enigmas and even dramas. The present is often the room of regrets.
This triple dimension of time will continue to be a subject of meditation for many. And not only for thinkers and philosophers. Because what we all experience is its unstoppable fluidity. How time passes! (or is it us?). We cannot do like Joshua who commanded the sun and the moon to stop their march in the battle against the Gibeonites (cf. Joshua 10, 12-13).
Perhaps the underlying problem with these upheavals of nostalgia for the past, fear of the future and unease about the present are due to our inability to live time to the full, accepting it. We lament the past because we have lost it, or we long for it by idealising it. The present only engenders regrets about how bad the times are – “all of them”, as Borges said. The future, precisely because it is unknown, frightens us. Faced with this great master that is time, which is killing its disciples, what can we learn?
The Bible has an answer on the lips of the wise Qoheleth, who left us a precious piece of advice for living this reality that is so intimately ours: “Everything has its time, and everything has its season under heaven” (Sir 3:1). Since God has created time in sufficient quantity, let us live with intensity the sacrament of the present moment. But how are you to live it?
- Be grateful for yesterday, but say “goodbye” to it. Say goodbye to it and don’t let yourself be trapped by the sticky chains of nostalgia that mortgage your freedom. Life can be understood by looking back and seeing it as providence, but it must be lived forward as promise.
- Embrace what comes to you today. If you are attentive and avoid rushing, you will discover how much is contained in everyday life. There are only two useless days in the year: one is called yesterday and the other tomorrow. Today is the ideal day to love, to grow, to do and, above all, to live. “Each day has its own meaning” (Mt 6,34).
- Abandon yourself to the tomorrow that God has prepared for you and places before you. Don’t spend your life worrying about things that will never happen to you. Have dreams, yes, but be able to bear what will happen. What must happen, will happen. And it will bring blessings. Especially in the end.
Time – yesterday, today, tomorrow – is the only stage on which we unfold our existence. Let us be careful not to “kill it or lose it” with the weapons of nostalgia, fear or haste.
Juan Carlos cmf
(PHOTO: Aron Visuals)
