Saturday, January 01, 2011

Timely reflections?

Happy New Year!

For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about time this week: the passing of time, how I use my time, what I have time for, make time for, the ways I protect my time sometimes, only to end up squandering it.

As I often do this time of year, my thoughts turned to Auden's "For the Time Being." Usually, I'm most struck by the line about "Remembering the stable where for once in our lives / Everything became a You and nothing was an It." But this week, the lines about time have grabbed me, especially that the time being is the "most trying time of all" and the suggestion that we feel we must redeem it from insignificance.

Time, of course, has already been redeemed from insignificance, not simply in the stable Auden mentions, but in the 33 years or so that followed, and especially in the death and resurrection of the babe from that stable. (Quick parenthetical shout-out to the brilliance of the gentle inclusion of the Cross in this Christmas poem, mentioned only in the "whiff of apprehension" at the coming of Lent and Good Friday.) But, of course, that is precisely what makes the time being so very trying: the battle is won. The temptation is, then, to simply bide our time, to live in the Aristotelian city. And, of course, the challenge is to figure out how to be in the world in such a way that we know that we don't need to redeem it and yet we also know that the difference we makes matters.

I'm not sure how well I do that, but I've been thinking about what I do make time for, fail to make time for, etc, and I want to change a couple of things. I'm usually not a great one for New Year's resolutions, but it seems the time is ripe, and I want to make one here publicly: I will blog more this year. Of course, blogging more than last year would probably not be much of a challenge, so I'll be more specific. I'll aim at blogging weekly, even if something brief.

My others are, I suppose, more personal. Or, to put it another way, they don't involve any of my potential readers so directly. Suffice it to say that they involve me becoming more disciplined with my time so that I manage to do the things that I want or need to do, rather than doing the things that I sort of drift into. There are, after all, bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, and (always my favorite!) irregular verbs to learn. There are also a number of books and articles that need me to write them. And there are some other things I would like to find a way to get done as well.

May 2011 be a blessed and wonderful year for you and yours!



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