AHSS The Gift of Years: Time (Lesson 20)

Pablo Picasso wrote, “It takes a long time to become young.” The beauty of the later years, in other words, is that if we have learned through life to trust our own insights at least as much as we trust the insights we have been taught, we find ourselves at the end of a very long life with a very young soul.

Time has done for us what needs to be done. We have deepened as people. We have broadened as personalities. We have softened as thinkers. We have abandoned arrogance and authoritarianism for reflection on new ideas and respect for others. We now see newly, clearly, what in some ways we have never seen before. If we watch older people closely, the free ones, the ones who let life come to them rather than trying to wrench it to themselves, we can see it happen right in front of us.

Nothing weighs more heavily on age than time. Nothing has more meaning. Time is now everything – the only thing- that is left in life. Time is, suddenly, not for wasting. Now time becomes, with a kind of ruthless honesty, what it has always been: life’s most precious commodity. The only difference is that, finally, we know it.

But time is not one-dimensional. Time I a great deal mor than simply “passing.” It has a function in life like little else. When we are young it goes slowly because we are always rushing. Living in the moment is not the mark of youth. Instead, the young are always on the way to somewhere else. They are immersed in wanting.

The old, on the other hand, have long ago exhausted both the wanting and the going and the striving. They are immersed in being. Being alive, being healthy, being present to the moment, being who they are, being happy, being young again in delight and in vision.

Time ripens things and brings everything to fulfillment. We have survived so much already, what can possibly destroy our equanimity now? Here we are still. Here we are yet. Here we are and that is enough for us to have it all. Time is a wonderous thing, if only we fill it well. If we do not allow the passing of time to dimmish our spirit but, instead, see it as a call to live life to the dregs- being our best and developing and life-loving selves to the end. Then time is our friend and not our enemy.

Now too, we have the quiet time, the solitary time, to think it all through – everywhere we’ve been, everyone we’ve known, everything we’ve done in life with all the glories and all the sad mistakes, all the successes and all the personal failures – and to be glad for all of it. There is not one part of this that did not teach us about life and make us stronger. They are everything we bring to this time now – when the only question yet to answer in life is what we have become.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is to allow time to hang heavy on my hands, to simply sit and wait for life to be over- as the Irish say, “knocking another day out of it till the great day comes.” A blessing of these years is to realize what an important and lively time this final period is. I can, if I will, bring it all together, into the final and the very best of me.

1. Sister Joan says that the passing of time has “tested our assumptions, tried our talents, developed our relationships softened our arrogance, opened our hearts to other possibilities, force us to think newly.” Spend time with one of these concepts and describe how it has unfolded in your life.
2. This week, instead of just crossing out the days on a calendar as they pass, take time to jot a few notes about what happened to you each day. At the end of the week, find a way to celebrate the blessings of passing time.