TJ Ray

By TJ Ray

Columnist

There is a fascinating silhouette image of a man’s head with two faces, facing in opposite directions.   To his credit, he at least sees in two directions, the rest of us being limited to one.  

Thus, we spend our time looking back and relishing or regretting things in the past, hoping to enjoy them again or to fix them.  Or we pass our time anticipating what comes next, dreading it or squirming with eagerness for IT to happen.

Sadly,  two faces or one face, looking back or looking forward, are incapable of the most precious view:  Now.  Yesterday haunts many of us because we think it shortchanged us, or it clutches us in memories of joyful events.  Tomorrow dangles before us like a golden ring or over us like a sword of Damocles.  

What is troubling (and so very, very human) is that so little time is spent looking around us now, savoring the moment.   Even if it is not a happy one, it is the only one we have any guarantee of.  

Being conscious of Now may not erase the disappointments and failures and angers of the past, but it can allow us to move past them.  Now may not insure a Nirvana future life, but it should alert us to the reality that what we do now may affect what comes next.  Sensible awareness of where we are and the resources we have may very likely prepare us for the future—if there is one.  

How sad if one spends all of today getting ready for a day that never dawns.  That is not to advocate that our next act should be ignored; remember that it wasn’t raining when Noah began the ark.

We are all between yesterday and tomorrow:  a new national government with all its adjustments and successes and failures, the next school semester of school before graduation and before a career, more life after a terrible diagnosis with its consequent treatments and pains. 

A student once wrote in an essay that something was between After and Before.  The more I think about that, the more stark it seems, for that is how life is.  

What is done is done, and we are left with regrets that can’t be resolved or joys that live on only as we remember them.  What is to come can’t be found under microscopes, through telescopes, on radar scopes, or in computers.

Long ago some preacher or Sunday School teacher read this to me: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?”  

Perhaps therein is some good sense:  what goes in and around the body is not the most significant facet of life.  All the fancy clothes and sweet scents and gourmet dishes will not stop aging and will not improve the spirit of the person.  Decades ago the flower children asked people to stop and smell the roses.  Passing years underscore the value of such a pastime.  

 

That great sage Anonymous Author had this to say about After and Before:  

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision

But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness

And tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day!

 

May I offer one more bit of advice?  Look not back in anger, not forward in fear, but around in awareness!