Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

I love Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth - a powerful sad story of ambition run amok. Macbeth was a strong dynamic warrior who allowed others to draw him inch by inch into choices that destroyed his own soul. Deceit and fear
gradually became his signature.

As the tyrant Macbeth grew cynical and jaded about life he waxed wonderfully eloquent about the futility of it all -

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow!

What's the point of it all when you've lost your soul - or sold it for farthings?

Time creeps. Day-by-day we make choices that become a way of life.
And yet time flies - in no time at all, we hit milestone birthdays. Where did the days go? What did we trade them for?

This week my wife has been helping her parents move from the city where they've lived since they came to Canada thirty-nine years ago. Creepingly they acquired far more 'stuff'' than can fit in their new down-sized space. And yet it seems to them like just last year they emigrated.

Sorry, Macbeth, I beg to differ with some of your brilliant metaphors.
Life is a lot more substantial than a walking shadow - and a lot faster too.
I want to develop that assertion, but right now I have to run. Perhaps tomorrow . . . or the day after.

Candle Photo - Courtesy of Betitina Schuller

Kairos Moments

I thought of calling this post “the ambiguity of time”, but what I really want to notice is the rich opportunity that every moment of life brings.

In Greek mythology, Chronos was ‘Father Time’, the personification of time in minutes, hours, days and years. But the wise Greeks also recognized that within the flow of time some moments are more momentous than others. There is a timeliness to things.

So they used a different word, ‘kairos’, to describe the right moment for something. Aristotle identified the point in an argument when the proof should be presented as the ‘kairos’ moment. Chronos is the quantity of time; kairos is the quality of time – time pregnant with purpose.

A Leap of Faith

Less than one in a thousand of us has February 29 for a birthday. This date comes only around every 4 years.

It takes 365 days plus almost six more hours to make a full orbit around the sun, so we get a quarter day behind every year. Back in the time of Julius Caesar (46 BCE) astronomers added an extra day to the calendar every four years to catch up. But that extra day actually gives us more time than we deserve,