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Cultural Musings on Chatham-Kent
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
As November creeps slowly upon us and the sensuous summer days and the lingering loveliness of a wonderfully soft September and October turn a little colder and much shorter, it evokes within me, each year, a time of reflection.It has even more impetus this year, for this past week one of our historical group members died very suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Death, especially when it stalks us unexpectedly in the fall, has a way of causing us to stop suddenly in our tracks and to once again review our past, present and future.
Life has a way of accelerating as we get older. The days get shorter and the list of promises to ourselves gets longer. One morning we awaken and all we have to show for our lives is a litany of "I'm going tos", "I plan tos" and "i'll do those things when life settles down a bit".
We tend to live all of our to-days in search of tomorrow instead of enjoying the present. Tomorrow I will run faster, try harder, work longer and be more successful. Too many of us ( myself included) rarely stop and look at our accomplishments but instead admonish ourselves for perceived failures or what we were not able to accomplish and fervently promise that, the next time, we will work harder and do it better.
Is there any among us who have not wished, in retrospect, that we had not taken more time to talk to a cherished grand parent, a loving aunt, uncle or parent? Too many times we allowed our lives and the petty concerns of these lives to dominate our lives at the expense of others. We consoled our consciences by telling ourselves that "next week" we will phone them or "next month" we would spend more time with them.
All too often these "tomorrows" and "next weeks" fade into thin air and we only stop to recall what we WERE going to do when we are standing beside a casket set among "forget me not" flowers and it is much too late.
I read a snippet of a poem the other day and although I first thought it to be trite and a bit simplistic, I read it again a few times and realized that its message was a bit more important that I had first imagined. It goes like this:
"Have you ever watched kids playing on a merry-go-round or listened to the rain lapping on the ground?
Have you ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
Do you run through each day on the fly? When you ask "How are you?", do you hear the reply?
When the day is done, do you lie in your bed with the next hundred chores running through your head? Ever told your child "We'll do it tomorrow" and in your haste, not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch? Let a good friendship die? Just call to say "Hi"?
When you worry and hurry through your day, it is like an unopened gift – thrown away. Life is not a race. Take it slower.
Hear the music, before the song is over."
As another year comes to an end, as we all get one more year older and as friends, relatives and loved ones, pass away, I think it's time that many of us stopped "measuring our lives out in coffee spoons" and started to live our lives as if to-day was our last day for – how do any of us know that it is not?
Jim and Lisa Gilbert are local, national and international award winning educators and historians.
