It’s about time. These three words may help guide you in making decisions about your life.
I’m offering this wisdom to anyone struggling with a life decision, trying to decide which path to take. I suspect there are many facing their own questions about potentially life-altering decisions.
There is a right and wrong time for everything under heaven, as the teacher Ecclesiastes said: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted…”
The trick is knowing what time it is in your life and using this to understand both the limits and possibilities of your decision. Of course, as with anything, nothing is certain about the future, but you can be sure of one thing — if you don’t make a choice about where you’re headed you’re likely to forgo your opportunity to have a hand in your own future.
Here are a few initial questions to consider. Do you need to make a decision soon or later? Can you delay choosing until things are clearer? Or will you miss a good opportunity by delay? Understanding these factors will shape whatever decision you make.
There are both quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time. Most of us think of the quantitative first — reducing time to numbers. How long do I have to decide? How much will I earn or lose in a possible new job?
I often used Ben Franklin’s suggestion for making decisions. Take a piece of paper and at the top write down one sentence describing what decision you are thinking of making. Then divide the page in half and on one side make a list of all the positive outcomes for the decision and on the other side all the negative. Sometimes your decision will become clear. However, the problem can be that the pluses and minuses balance out and your remain uncertain what to do.
Face it, life is more than numbers. Time also has a qualitative dimension, measured by its depth or quality. The Greeks had a word for this kind of time — kairos. It has to do with moments which seem apart from clock time but felt when its deeper meaning speaks to you. It’s when you intuitively know the time is ripe to decide.
Everyone can be attentive to these qualitative moments of time simply by staying aware when they happen. You will know it when you feel it.
Here’s my example when I felt a different dimension of time breaking into my life. Years ago in Wales while climbing a hill that rose above the Tintern Abbey, I felt a deep sense of meaning I might have missed — that there is a deeper drama going on than the obvious.
I found out later that not long ago not only had my family settled in a nearby village but the poet Williams Wordsworth had climbed the same hill and written one of my favorite poems in 1798 about his visit to the hill above Tintern Abbey. It described what I had felt centuries later.
“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
What I learned from Wordsworth and my own experience was a comforting and calming thought — there is a greater and more abiding presence in our midst that sustains us in hard times and points the way to more than meets the eye — life is deeper than despair and full of greater meaning. This is an ancient truth of poets, prophets and mystics of all cultures and times but also one open to everyone.
Life is about time, but time itself has more dimensions than those measured by the clock. There are moments in time when it seems to fade and be replaced by a deeper dimension. The Celtic imagination believes there are “thin places” where if only briefly the curtain is drawn and one understands a deeper reality.
The trick is staying awake, both to clock time and to that other dimension that breaks through, as it did for Wordsworth on a hill above Tintern Abbey in Wales. This was the message for me — pay attention to those moments that point to some deeper realities breaking through.
Franklin, that most practical of all philosophers, wrote clearly the best way to live: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”
John C. Morgan is an author and teacher whose columns range from personal to societal moral issues and concerns. Your comments are welcome at johnmorgan33@yahoo.com
