Basic to the journey of life and its seasons or stages is the passage of time. Most people, as they grow older, ask, “Where does time go?” The corollary question is, where does time come from? These are questions of the soul--what is our source and what is our destination? In Aging and the Human Spirit, Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel (1985:41-42) says the following about time (italics mine):
Time is the only aspect of existence which is completely beyond man’s control.
Most of us do not live in time but run away from it; we do not see its face, but its makeup. (That is, the superficial aspects of life.)
Blind to the marvel of the present moment, we live with memories misled, and in anxiety about an emptiness that lies ahead.
Time has independent ultimate significance; it is of more majesty and more provocative of awe than even a sky studded with stars. Gliding gently in the most ancient of all splendors, it tells so much more than space can say in its broken language of things..…
Things of space exhibit a deceptive independence. They show off a veneer of limited permanence. Things created conceal the Creator. It is the dimension of time wherein (we meet) God, wherein (we become) aware that every instant is a new creation, a Beginning, opening up new roads for ultimate realizations. Time is the presence of God in the world of space, and it is within time that we are able to sense the unity of all beings.
Time is perpetual, perpetual novel. Every moment is a new arrival, a new bestowal. Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy. The moment is the marvel; it is in evading it that boredom begins that ends in despair.
Old age has the vicious tendency of depriving a person of the present. The aged thinks of him/(her)self as belonging to the past. But it is precisely the openness to the present that he/she must strive for.
>He/she who lives with a sense of the Presence knows that to get older does not mean to lose time but rather to gain time. And, (we) also know that in all (our) deeds, the chief task of (humans) is to sanctify time. All it takes to sanctify time is God, a soul, and a moment. And the three are always here.
Cole and Winkler (1994:5) write of time
While scientific research and medical technology will continue to alter the biological possibilities of human life, they cannot free us from the necessity of living within limits. Time – invisible, intangible, yet inexorable – is perhaps the most mysterious limit of all. Aging is about living in time. Born into the world at a certain historical moment, destined to pass out of it as a later, uncertain moment, we are creatures who change significantly over a lifetime. For groups as well as individuals, time brings changes of form and condition.
‘And there are always new thresholds to cross,’ writes the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in Rites of Passage (1908) “the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity, and old age: the thresholds of death and that of afterlife – for those who believe in.”
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