A Time to Regret

It is a particular habit among human beings to fashion a story to fit the time--and the more stressful the time, the more extreme the story. We generally fashion stories that either shine the harshest light on people who have hurt us or shine the most positive light on ourselves. Or both. As time itself passes on, the old stories, the stories we have constructed to protect ourselves, one might say, tend to shed their rougher edges and approach a more honest appraisal. Where once we insisted on being right, we now begin to become more purely human again, and very probably wrong. We make a place for regret. We acknowledge weakness. We face our mistakes and, hopefully, we learn from them. We find that it is keenly unfortunate that we cannot go back and begin with knowing what we have come to know in the balance of time. This is the pathos of life. In time, we may even learn to catch ourselves before our straw men are made, to see the true picture not so much with passion as with compassion. It doesn't change the past, but it does instruct the future. We cannot communicate with the past, any more than we can communicate with the dead. Not a word of anger or unkindness can ever be erased. This is our burden to the end. The burden of being wrong, the burden of being unable to undo the wrong. What we can do is prepare words for this time and for the future--words that we will not regret, words that will not haunt but will bless. The time is short, and always has been--we just didn't know it. Redeem the time therefore, as scripture says, make no waste of it through unworthiness, through surrender to the weaker things. Little do we know the fragility, or the preciousness, of what we have in any instance--and quickly is it gone altogether.