One thing which has obsessed poets and philosophers since they first began poetizing and philosophizing is the inexorable and inevitable passage of time. Today becomes yesterday in a regular pace - 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day. The sun rises and it sets over and over again. The seasons change: spring follows winter; summer, spring; fall comes on summer's heels; and then winter comes again. We, too, are bound in this passage of time. We are born, we mature, we age, we die. Today becomes yesterday, tomorrow becomes today.
Just what time is, is an interesting question. It is duration, yet it has none. The present is an infinitesimal point - everything else is past and future, and we stand ambiguously and confusedly in the middle, not sure whether to try to hold on to the past, clutch at the present as it slips by, welcome or fend off the future.
Of course, we all do all of those at one time or another, depending on whether life is pleasant at the moment or not. If things are not going well for us, it is easy to decide that the past was better and lose ourselves in dreams of it. Have you ever noticed that when you think of incidents in your early childhood that it was always summer? Well, not always! If you ever lived in the north there were times that there was a beautiful four-foot snowfall with drifts up to six feet, and the snow was just the right kind for making snowballs or building snowmen, the kitchen was warm, and your clothes had been warmed by the stove - but the rest of the time it was summer, with birds singing, flowers blooming, picnics at the beach and no responsibility.
Some people carry it even further. They go back beyond their childhood to a different era. They try to live in that era by accepting its values and sometimes even more than that. I'm sure you are familiar, for example, with a national group of medievalists called the Society for Creative Anachronism, who get suits of armor and carry swords and spears, or dress in clothes with sleeves dragging the ground and high conical hats with scarves dangling from them, and hold mock tournaments. They are living under the illusion that life was simpler then, just as the rest of us who view our childhood years or later times when we think we were happy, as simpler, better times, are living under an illusion. Life was just as complicated for individuals in the Middle Ages - and just as painful - as it is for us now, and childhood is just as complicated and painful for children as adulthood is for adults. That is why we say, truthfully, that youth is wasted on the young. With our 20-20 hindsight, we could handle the problems which as children we found so unbearable, and with our greater sophistication and technical knowledge we could also handle most of the major problems of medieval times. But those times are gone, and we can't bring them back.
One of the most common and pressing reasons for trying to live in the past is the occurrence of the death of someone who is important to you -- not even a George Harrison or a Eudora Welty - but a relative, a close friend, a husband or wife. We cherish the memories, we feel that the one who is dead is still with us, we refuse to say that what is gone, is gone.
It might seem proper to condemn this living in the past as silly and unrealistic, but it can be, in fact, often a very good thing. Anything can be carried to extremes and thereupon become crippling to our ability to cope with the here and now, yet it is useful and pleasant to keep the past alive. It gives us insight and knowledge, and if it simply makes us happier it has fulfilled a very important task. Especially in the case of mourning over a death can it be encouraged for a while. It is in this way that grief is strong enough to overcome the tramplings of loss, and as we keep our own past alive, we also, in a sense, keep alive those who were a part of it. So let us cherish and hold on to the past. Though we can't go home again, we can bring that home with us. It will certainly be distorted and idealized, but some portion of the truth will be preserved, and if the truth contains something of pleasure, comfort, beauty, love and laughter, it is well worth preserving.
There are those of us, however, who look upon the past with shuddering and the present with loathing, who turn to hopes, dreams and fantasies of the future for their comfort. They cannot live in the future, but they can live for it. It is necessary for all of us to do this to a degree. The future is coming whether we want it or not, so it is best to prepare for it, no matter what is said about the virtues of the lilies of the field. We must take thought what we shall eat and what we shall wear if we intend to eat or wear anything. Although the future contains events which we cannot plan for - which in fact throw all our well-laid plans into confusion, without such planning it would be confusion hopelessly confounded; and without dreams of a better future, the future can never be better than the present. As long as we avoid allowing dreams to become our reality, an orientation toward the future is as valuable as one toward the past.
The thing about the present, the thing that drives philosophers and logicians crazy, is that though it has no duration, it's where, at any given time, we all are. It is where - memories of the past and dreams of the future taken into account - everything is happening. It is the reality. It is a reality to be enriched and shaped by the past and future, but dealt with as it is. You can't hold on to it, but you can't get out of it.
One of the difficult things about time is its subjectivity. In our lives, time passes as it will. It doesn't really have speed, nor can we really measure time. We measure our own inventions of seconds, minutes and hours. If what we call hours were half as long so that there were forty-eight of them in a day, that would make the day no longer. Our subjectivity is what makes time seem to be passing sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, depending on what we're doing. Church services usually last a lot longer than your favorite hour-long TV show even though the elapsed time is the same. We often choose to do the things which cause time to pass quickly, not just because we usually enjoy them, which is why time speeds, but sometimes simply to kill time.
This is one of the human paradoxes. We spend a lot of time passing the time, but even as we do it we hear time's chariot hurrying at our backs. We know that we will not last forever, and so we try to experience all we can before we die. Some suggest that we should live each day as if it were our last, as if we were going to die tomorrow, so that as we age and the nearness of our end becomes apparent to us, we will have few regrets. Certainly it would be a good thing if we could so live our lives that we could be like the saint who, hoeing his garden, was asked what he would do if he knew that he was to die the next day. He answered, "I would go on hoeing my garden." However, few of us are so contented with our lives that that would be our response, and probably even fewer of us would be contented with so little. I think it is more likely that if we really knew the day of our death to be near and still had health, money - or a place to get it - and our wits, we would spend the time in probably less creditable and certainly more exciting ways than our everyday life could encompass. Surely we should live our lives to the hilt, but it would be not only impossible, but, I think, wrong, to live as if the future did not exist for us. More sensibly, we could live as if everyone else we know were going to die tomorrow. We can't really do that either, but if we tried, what nice people we would be! We would treat one another with such kindness and sympathy! That, too, I suppose, could be carried to extremes. If your husband were going to die tomorrow, you wouldn't bother to get him a sweater at an August sale, but at least you'd be very nice to him, so maybe it would be worth it. He can always buy his own sweater.
If we were to behave in that way, perhaps it would alleviate another aspect of the passage of time which is productive of much despair: that what is done, is done. It cannot be changed. There are many things we do that we wish we had not done, that we could go back and undo or do better. That realization makes our choosing much more difficult. Every choice made closes out other options, and we can't go back and re-choose, as we can't go back in time. Worse, what sometimes seem like very unimportant choices can have huge ramifications. If you look at your present situation, studying the line of causes of every effect, it's almost scary to think how trivial and unrelated to anything important some of them seem. I read a science fiction story once (I think by Ray Bradbury]) about the first journey back in time. There had just been an important and very close election, and the good guys had won. The time travelers went back to prehistoric times in order to make the least possible impact on a past which would affect their present. One change was made. One of the travelers stepped on a butterfly and crushed it. On their return to the present the results of the election were changed.
We may feel that we have wasted our lives, that we have done nothing of significance, that if we could do things over again we'd make something of ourselves, yet every little thing we do may have an impact we can't even imagine. What if, for instance, you were to make one - not even the last one - of a crowd to see a movie, and someone who was unable to get in went somewhere else, met her future husband, and later produced a baby who became the first world president. How's that for impact?! - and you wouldn't even know about it. However great or small the result, however, what's done is done, and even if you were later to discover that the color socks you chose to wear this morning will have a terribly adverse effect on the future, regrets are vain. You can't not have done it.
Despite the impact of almost every detail, however slight, and the eternal significance of nearly every act, another possible cause of despair is our awareness that in the passage of time, nothing lasts forever. Like Shelley's Ozymandias, no matter how vast our power, how great our deeds, eventually they will all be forgotten. Not only does the passage of time change everything, but eventually it devours everything. On the other hand, the knowledge that nothing lasts forever, and that all things change can be productive of hope as well as despair. Though all good things must cease to be, so must all the things that are bad. If all things end, so must pain and sorrow. Though weeping endures for a night, joy comes in the morning.
One of the things that advancing age has enabled me to understand that was once a mystery to me is the huge celebration of New Year's Eve. Why, I wondered, throw a big party with drinking, kissing and singing just because December 31st becomes January 1st? To my literal mind it seemed even sillier to make New Year's resolutions. Why choose January 1st to begin a diet or to quit smoking? Does that one day have some magic in it to give will power that was previously lacking? Of course it doesn't. January 1st is almost exactly like December 31st. It's just as cold and just about as dark -- the increase in sunlight is negligible - and to add to it all, you're quite likely to have a hangover from the night before, which may, in fact, help a dieter with a queasy stomach, but will do nothing whatever for the repentant smoker. What difference does the changing of one digit in the human label of a year make?
Recently I have become either more foolish or more wise, because I have decided that all those people who were taking that instant of time when the year changed number seriously were quite right to do so, and I was the one who was wrong. We need rituals to celebrate important times and to cope with major events in our lives. This particular ritual celebrates the passage of time itself. It reminds us that all things change with time, that the past is the past and that we can take some responsibility for the future. We can remember that crying over spilled milk is useless, and that there are many unspilled jugs of it ahead of us. That's not to say that we won't spill some of them. We will. We always do, but they're not spilled yet.
In the Catholic church the sacrament of confession takes care of this ritual cleansing in part, but confession only handles sins. It seems to me that it is often rather our idiocies that cause us the most discomfort. It's the times we've made fools of ourselves that we wake up at 3:00 in the morning and squirm over. One way to deal with that is to move to a far place periodically where no one knows all the embarrassments you have perpetrated in your former home. New Year's Eve is next-best, because it reminds us that the things that we have done are done forever, and that in the future we can at least try to do better - to cause less harm, to live more authentically, and to make fools of ourselves, if not less often, at least more gracefully.
So I wish all of you a heartfelt Happy New Year. Though the future is based on an unchanged and unchangeable past, and though we are doomed in our imperfections to err, the page in front of us is yet unblotted. We have not full control over what is to be written on it, but we will have influence as we respond to events and make our own choices. If we can respond to the coming year, as the future becomes the present, with grace, integrity and love, we can make it the best New Year possible.