‘You are the music While the music lasts.’ TS Eliot from Four Quartets 3; The Dry Salvages
As I’ve wrapped my head around the usual glut of admin which always awaits me on return from travel, I’ve also picked up a 2026 diary. ‘A little early,’ I hear you say; but there’s so much information to transfer from the 2025 one that I need to not leave it til 31st December.
Old fashioned as I am, a hard copy, paper diary helps keeps my thoughts in order according to my wiring as being a visual learner. This way, I more or less keep on top of things. I always purchase one from the Cancer Research shopper whom I continue to cheer loud and long. Their format allows me to see the next week – or even month –ahead, and so process some of the logistics required to keep the wheels of life turning reasonably smoothly.
The first piece of information to be moved across is a month by month notation of birthdays of families and friends. These are written in red in the (sometimes vain) hope that they will catch my eye and not be overlooked in the melee of other appointments and the maelstrom of life.
So far so methodical.
But this year has seen me somewhat rattled by my administrative activity. Suddenly, the numbers I am writing in by everyone’s name, indicating their age, or the number of years they’ve been married, seems to have grown exponentially. I know that’s not possible; but how is that my brothers-in-law, who I have blithely and mentally kept as somewhere around 36, are now approaching a seventh decade?
I suppose that having grown-and-flown children, the youngest married this summer, and another niece plighting her troth this past week, I should really have twigged that we are all getting older. It is, after all, inevitable. Even I have another birthday later this month – it’s come round so quickly! But this is all a salutary reminder that nothing lasts for ever.
More change will be coming along before long and I am not a fan of change.
Health challenges may require, stents, cataract operations and heart medicines before we get as far as walking frames and care homes. The six-sided box is mandatory for us all in the end. What if one of my sisters find themselves facing widowhood in the next couple of years? What if one of them is struck down by some hideous, invasive illness? How will that change my relationship with their husbands when, for the last forty years or so, those relationships have been conducted in the company of said sisters? I cannot wrap my head around the fact that these hurdles will need to be navigated, if not in 2026, then quite probably before 2050. Even my doughty mother who has reached 93, is unlikely to make another ten years. Am I equipped for these gloomy prognostications?
I remember multiple English Literature lessons in which we deconstructed, dissected and reflected on elegiac poems which lamented the passing of time and the transience of life. Anyone else remember Thomas Hardy’s Lament?
[… But/ She is shut, she is shut/ From the cheer of them, dead/ To all done and said/ In a yew-arched bed]
Or how about Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard?
[Can storied urn or animated bust/ Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?/ Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,/ Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?]
Sitting in a draughty classroom, it all seemed rather abstract; so far over the horizon that the distance from that adolescent reality was too vast to contemplate with any genuine reality. Flowers die. Your pets die. Even your grandparents die.
We all gave mental assent to the fact that when sands of time run out, we too would/will, one day, die. But it didn’t mean very much then. Our whole lives stretched ahead full of promise.
It was Fydor Dostoyevsky who said it best in The Brothers Karamoazov: Everything passes, only truth remains.
A wise old Russian, and a man of deep faith that influenced his writing and worldview, Dostoyevsky knew that truth was more than a fact, it was, and still is, a person.
Jesus Himself said: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’ (John 14:6)
Regardless of the passing of time and those horrifying large numbers beside birthdays, this declaration gives me great comfort as the year prepares to turn again.
[All images courtesy of Pixabay.]
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