Evanescence and Regret

When I was young and starting out in the world, I knew an old Hindu and, in reply to my youthful expressions of striving through life and not surrendering, he just used to smile and say: "Life is about resignation, my friend; resignation!" As I have grown older I have come around to his point of view. Whether there is a "Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will" or not, we are bound to time-out at some stage. The knowledge that this is so is borne in on us from an early age. We become aware that loved ones: people and pets; the rich and famous - all die - and that we too will die.

This fundamental fact actually adds savour to to the enjoyment of the time that we have and sharpens

our senses to the beauty of the passing moment: evidenced in everything from our appreciation of the budding, flowering and dying of a summer garden rose, to the sun rising and setting each day, or the waxing and waning of the moon; the ebb and flow of the tide; the passing sound of a bell, or the fading away of a long-remembered scent.

We may revisit, actually or in memory, the places and the doorways through which we walked long ago and from where others watched us go but they bear no perceptible traces of these happenings, they just framed our lives; our movements; our thoughts; our dreams; our yearnings; our arrivals; our departures. Others come and paint over the paint on the wood and perform their own events in these places and when we return and stare up at them we realize, most unexpectedly, that what we miss most, what hits hardest and most cruelly, is not all the 'little deaths at parting' but all the time that we have wasted since we left: and no time is more wasted than that wasted in regret.


The picture is of the great three-sided clock on Platform I at Paddington Station; which is one of the few buildings that, over recent years, has been immensely improved and well conserved by the spate of civic 'regeneration'.