NO PAST, NO FUTURE
Here is a stanza from a poem “A
Psalm of Life”. Its author is an American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807-1882}. The full poem is pretty long comprising nine stanzas of four
lines each. The first stanza reads like this:
Tell
me not, in mournful numbers,
Life
is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And
things are not what they seem.
The stanza which I have referred to
above is as follows:
Trust
no future, howe’er pleasant!
Let
the dead past bury its dead!
Act,
act in the living present!
Heart
within, and God o’erhead!
Of the three divisions of
time--- present, past and future, only the present is available to us. It is
here and now and is turning into past every fraction of a second. We are using
it as we wish. As for the past, it is gone ever and exists only in historical
records. The future is totally uncertain. It may or may not come. We cannot be
sure about its availability.
People who go on remembering
the past and keep their minds loaded with its good or bad events, waste even
their present time. It is desirable to keep our minds empty of what happened in
the past and what may happen in future. Talking
about painful or shameful events of the past, especially to hurt some listeners
is hardly appreciable. Hence, the psychologically and morally
sound advice of the poet:
Act,
act, in the living present !
Heart
within, and God o’erhead !
*********
G.R.Kanwal
24 June 2024
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