Three Words Only ...

– Elfriede Herb –

Huge is the power of words! Like those “three I hardly expected that time would speak to me in a words only”, which brightly came along on the occasion of a small happening but were bound to lead to an abundance of thoughts.

It happened at a weekend in a much visited supermarket. Unlike other days with three checkout points, on this occasion there was only one, behind which a long queue of people waited in rising indignation. A second cashier had failed to turn up, seemingly unwell. In the meantime the waiting customers grew emotionally more and more vehement. Right in the middle of this unrest somebody uttered simply and calmly: “I have time ...” We who were standing around him looked at him like an alien. He stood there straight, smiling, totally relaxed and uninhibited he left his three words behind, which were to become unforgettable to me.

“I have time” – just a short sentence, but full of a life of its own in my consciousness, where it changed itself into the question: What is time?

What is time? These three words now remained stubbornly with me as if they were inevitably attached to my shadow. They really became a bit of a burden to me, and I tried to get rid of them.

Nature is always a good counsellor, I thought to myself and went out into the garden. It was still there, and so I sat down with my invisible load under the trusty, already leafy willow tree on a bright stone.

“Time,” I asked, “Please tell me! What are you, where do you come from? We human beings tend to say: the time passes. Do you really pass and where do you go then? How old are you? We talk about the stoneage time and even of the Archaean period, the primeval time, so do you go way back, and even before? I feel quite giddy when I think further, I mean there is always a ‘before’, is there not? You know it is high time that I found out what you really consist of, so that I do not all my life go chasing after you, seeking to comprehend and grasp you. Do you understand how time-wasting and time-consuming that would be for me?” I was amazed at my own rhetoric, my head was like a dictionary which had mysteriously opened at the page “time” and was hastily putting words in my mouth.

Breathing in deeply I felt very happy, how exquisitely the air filled my lungs, heard the water splashing in the pond nearby, while the blackbird sang its evening song. What that little throat was able to produce astonished me once again, as so often before; the bird had obviously sung her last notes and then she flew off. What remained was the garden silence and I with my thoughts.

human voice; but experience shows us when we are deeply absorbed in a certain question, we suddenly bear the answer like a ripe fruit, as long as we allow time its secret measure. So I kept on thinking under the willow tree and at other places as I followed my thoughts further along, and night dreams appeared from the past; some which I was happy to forget, but also some which added a touch of magic to the awaking day.

You, time, stretch yourself painfully, while during joyous festivities we ask ourselves where you have gone. How relative everything is here on earth! Although I had long ago heard it from the theory of Einstein, the importance of this truth, from which so much else can be derived, had never caught my deep interest. Every- thing does have its time! In this way my understanding of Psalm 90 also grew by and by: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night ...” Like a ball of wool that, when finally unravelled, frees plain and simply the run of the thread, so simply did in a quiet hour the redeeming answer arise out of my innermost, with the recognition of the earthly concept of time, bound to the space in which we find ourselves. Our moon and distant stars have their own spaces and thereby their own clocks, which tick differently from ours.

“Ah,” I said, “on my search for you, time, I have in reality always only thought of times, of this life which has been subdivided into time segments for the sake of order! But you, time – the fog is now receding, the scales are falling from my eyes – you are something else. You do not pass, how could you? Are you not like life and love without beginning and without end, for us humans incomprehensibly eternal, like the Eternal One. A fool was I when I spoke of not having time when all my life I have been swimming in you like a fish in the sea, and how we would laugh if the fish asked what water is.

You stand still and we move into you. The doubts and secret anxieties depart. There is no suffering in you, we create for ourselves the good and also the miserable times with our volition and decisions. All our changes of form you keep; in your book we could read the timely fates of entire galaxies, if we were but able to do so!

Doors have opened into a changed, wide world, and all whose time has come within these times, have either known for long enough or will know soon:

“We do have time, because it is eternal ...”