I thought that I was through with the subject of “time.”  But no, the choice is not , was not mine.  “Time” is not through with me.  There is more that I must say.

It is impossible to assess the meaning of time, because we are like fish; we humans swim in the sea of time.  The sea has a shoreline. As I think about our situation in time, I believe that times gift or limitation to us, is that of boundaries.  It depends upon one’s attitude whether a limit/boundary is regarded as a boon, or as a curse.  Of course we need boundaries, lines, in order to diagram our expectations in business, in society, etc.  Deadlines for filing your tax return, a agreed upon time to keep an appointment, the clock winding down for a football game, would be just a few.

The “elephant in the room” a boundary that is discussed with great difficulty, is that of our own death.  Each of us will have a time and place of expiration.  That is the existential meaning of “time” for you and for I.  The event of ones passing in history is often spoken of as “crossing the river to the other side.”  That is how Stonewall Jackson spoke of his impending death, as he lay mortally wounded in a two story house at Guinea Station, south of Fredericksburg.

One of my favorite movies is Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator.”.  Maximus the demoted general who is a slave speaks to his friend Juba and says:

I knew a man who once said, ‘Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.’

My better judgment tells me that this is more than a artifact of Stoicism, a remnant of a defunct Greco-Roman school of philosophy.  Each of us is going to die.  How one dies is the discretionary aspect of the matter.  Nothing else.

So I offer this youtube video on the ultimate boundary of my space/time, the limit of my life: my death.  That sounds so final, and perhaps it is.  Never the less, cannot one sing and dance in the face of one’s own death?  I think so.  The humanizing move is to ‘smile back.’

The song, a perennial favorite of Blood Sweat and Tears is a tribute to one of the great lyricists, Laura Nyro.  She wrote these lyrics when she was sixteen.  The song was released on her first LP in January of 1967 when she was nineteen.  Laura passed aged 49 in 1997 of ovarian cancer.

Lyric and tune is a philosophical expression of the meaning of life and death.  I love the plaintive harmonica intro, and the back beat of the bass drum in the studio/record rendition. The backbeat symbolizes for me the heartbeat of the cosmos.  The bright horn notes combine with the lyrics to smile back at death.

Enjoy!

And when I die, and when I’m dead
Dead and gone
There’ll be
One child born, in our world
To carry on, to carry on………….