Good morning…
I began my 62nd birthday week writing a blog post entitled The Art of Aging. Now, look what I just found tucked on our bookshelf – a book entitled The Art of Aging by Sherwin B. Nuland. I vaguely remember a generous friend giving me this gift a while back, and I had yet to open its cover until this moment.
On the pristine page before the Table of Contents, I read this quote.
Father Time is not always a hard parent,
and, though he tarries for none of his children,
often lays his hand lightly
upon those who have used him well.
– Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, 1841
As I peruse the chapter titles, I am drawn to the final chapter, “A Coda for Life.” Coda. I think, “What does Coda mean?”
Vocabulary.com teaches me: “A coda is a concluding segment of a piece of music, a dance, or a statement. It’s usually short and adds a final embellishment beyond a natural ending point. Like this.
Coda comes from the Latin word cauda, meaning “tail,” and it’s good to think of it as a tail tacked onto something that in and of itself is already a whole.”
I am drawn to this final chapter, and, on page 281, I discover an intriguing paragraph.
“We live in moments, hours, and individual days. This is how things get done. Though the future must be planned for, and though all we are at any instant is the result of all that we have been in the past, the actual living of our lives occurs in what William Osler a century ago called ‘day-tight compartments.’ Addressing an assemblage of Yale students in 1913, he quoted Carlyle, who wrote, ‘Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.’ At any age, we must engage actively with the present. Be sure to climb a mountain from time to time, he urged, so that you may partake of the wisdom that comes from looking in all directions. Plan for future hopes, but to reach that time lying ahead, we must focus on the work of today: ‘Absorption in the duty of this hour is in itself the best guarantee of ultimate success.’ A man may hold a single day in his hand, Osler advised, and in this way make it his own. ‘The future is to-day,’ he proclaimed. ‘The day of man’s salvation is now – the life of the present, of to-day, lived earnestly, intently, without a forward-looking thought, is the only insurance for the future. Let the limits of your horizon be a twenty-four hour circle.”
Oh, I like that tail, that coda.
Let the limits of your horizon be a twenty-four hour circle.
Plant your seeds in the morning, and continue to work until the evening. You do not know which seeds will become strong plants. Perhaps only some of them will grow. Perhaps they will all grow well (Ecclesiastes 11:6, EASY).
Wholeheartedly, we focus on the day at hand, and we trust God to grow strong whatever is needed.
…Sue…
