Received a forward this morning from a very dear friend, an elderly lady whom I met for the first time on this site. It is a poem by Mario de Andrade (San Paolo 1893-1945) poet, novelist, essayist and musicologist called "My soul has a hat".
It just reminded me again about how fleeting time is and how our perspectives change with the passing years. Not that one has not realized it earlier, but reading something like this just reinforces the feeling.
Not long ago (or so it seems to me, when I think of events - it is a different story when numbers give the same time period a different perspective) I used to be 'young,' though, believe me, I felt 'old' then. I used to complain endlessly about being bored, used to count the number of years left and they felt like a burden on my then 'young' shoulders. I did not particularly enjoy what I did - going to school, college, doing what I was told to, worrying about my future ..... The world seemed to be such a dark place. It seems like yesterday.
A few decades down the line, I spend my time in my room, "doing nothing" some might say and as I myself suspect every now and then, but it seems like 24 hours are not enough to do everything I'd like to do. Maybe I get that feeling, because there are so many more things I would like to do in addition to whatever it is that I do, plan to do or decide to do but then don't do. Sleep which then was a welcome escape seems today to be nothing but an interruption in my scheme of things, something I guess like it is to all babies who have so much to discover in life. And the time between the aforementioned 'then' and 'today' or lesser is all that I have left on this planet (at least till the curtains go up again for yet another show, though I shall be quite contented to let the curtains go down and let it rest at that). And then I realize that that seemingly long (in arithmetic terms) chunk of time flew off before I knew what was happening and before I realized it, I am sitting here and pontificating on time and life. All that happened in between is still a blur.
It is overwhelming to think of all that has to be done during that time. Well let me think: Clearing up my home would be a wonderful starting point. Downsizing (physical self as well as belongings) would be be essential to accomplish the first point. Loads to be done in terms of expansion of the intellectual sheaths. Lessons in patience, letting go and anger control to be learned. Travel before it is too late - can't say "while I'm still in my pink", I suppose 'coz it is already "later than I think". Though I might possibly just be a wee bit pinker than I ever will be. Be of some use to the world, so people can think of me fondly when I am no longer here. That is already a looooooong enough list to be accomplished in the short time left to me.
Any regrets in life? No big ones. Just that I wish that the younger I could have "understood" in the truest sense of the word how transient and fleeting life and time is and that the opportunities available to young people have today were available to us then. Maybe I could have achieved something more significant in life.
And what about lessons .....? Well, looking at how awfully polarised and dark the times are today, maybe now the past does not seem so dark. No use, though, thinking of the past. So live in the here and now is the biggest lessons of this lifetime.
