How to Befriend Time? Khalil Ghibran Poetry.

Our experience of life is a continous flow of events, which only but helps us evolve our thoughts, perceptions and way of living.

That is why different types of exposures, upbringings, cultural influences shape our character. They really define our individuality.

The great physicist Dr R. P. Feynman has given a wonderful description of what is "understanding the nature".

The great physicist "Dr R. P. Feynman" has been given a wonderful description of what is "understanding the nature". Suppose we do not know the basic rules of chess but are allowed to watch the moves of players. If we watch the game from a long time, then we may know some of the rules. With the knowledge of these rules we may try to the understand why a player played the particular move. However, this can be a very difficult task. Even if we know all this rules of chess, it is not simple to understand all the complications of a game in a given situation and the predict the correct move. Knowing the basic rules is, however, the minimum requirement if any progress is to be made.

One can guess at a wrong rule by partially watching the game. The experienced player may make use of a rule for the first time and the observer of the game may get surprised. Because of the new move some of the rules guessed at may prove to be wrong and the observer will frame new rules.

Hence, evolving in life, we humans too, in the same way, often find our conclusions and conceptions getting destroyed and formed.

The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe.

“you cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”

That transmutation and integration is what poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) takes up with uncommon soulfulness in his long poem “Youth and Age,” penned in his early forties, shortly after he completed The Prophet - his literary work which he is the most famous for.

Khalil Ghibran's poem "Youth and Age" perfectly makes us feel that transistion phases that we as evolving humans undergo.

Youth and Age :- 

"In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.

But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.

But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,

And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.

But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles."

"The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.

A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.

But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,

Though life has been bitter upon his lips.

In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.

But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.

Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.

And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery."

"In my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.

But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;

And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand."

"In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”

But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring."

"In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down."

"Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.

And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks.

Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips.

And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek.

In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant.

Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again."

In his youth, Gibran reflects, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.

This attitude but teaches us - how to simply befriend time.

Thanks,

Daksh Parekh