To Everything, There is a Season

Making peace with the passage of time

We all know it. Or at least feel it intuitively.

That we are creatures of time, that time is change and change is entropy and without entropy, there would be no time. At least not for us.

Still, we yearn for permanence despite all reason as we struggle to accept living with our own finitude and the finitude of those we love and care for.

As each turn of the season adds a little more to our private library of loss.

And yet it is our ability to make peace with the passage of time that determines our inner peace, (or the lack of it).

It is what Pete Seeger knew when he adapted, nearly verbatim, a passage from the Hebrew Bible — Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 — into the classic 1959 song “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season),” and Nina Simone sang her heart into it:

But perhaps it was Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) who best described the profound changes the human body and soul go through looking through the lens of menopause, (euphemized as ‘change of life’) not only as a particular to the female body, but rather the universal experience of change and our bias against old age.

With her distinctive playfulness, she wrote:

If a spaceship came by from the friendly natives of the fourth planet of Altair, and the polite captain of the spaceship said, “We have room for one passenger; will you spare us a single human being, so that we may converse at leisure during the long trip back to Altair and learn from an exemplary person the nature of the race?” — I suppose what most people would want to do is provide them with a fine, bright, brave young man, highly educated and in peak physical condition… There would surely be hundreds, thousands of volunteers, just such young men, all worthy. But I would not pick any of them. Nor would I pick any of the young women who would volunteer, some out of magnanimity and intellectual courage, others out of a profound conviction that Altair couldn’t possibly be any worse for a woman than Earth is.

What I would do is go down to the local Woolworths, or the local village marketplace, and pick an old woman, over sixty, from behind the costume jewellery counter or the betel-nut booth. Her hair would not be red or blonde or lustrous dark, her skin would not be dewy fresh, she would not have the secret of eternal youth. She might, however, show you a small snapshot of her grandson, who is working in Nairobi. She is a bit vague about where Nairobi is, but extremely proud of the grandson. She has worked hard at small, unimportant jobs all her life, jobs like cooking, cleaning, bringing up kids, selling little objects of adornment or pleasure to other people.

Sharply aware of our troubled views on aging — something Ursula would address several years later in her meditation on the art of growing older — she added:

The trouble is, she will be very reluctant to volunteer. “What would an old woman like do on Altair?” she’ll say. “You ought to send one of those scientist men, they can talk to those funny-looking green people. Maybe Dr. Kissinger should go. What about sending the Shaman?” It will be very hard to explain to her that we want her to go because only a person who has experienced, accepted, and acted the entire human condition — the essential quality of which is Change — can fairly represent humanity. “Me?” she’ll say, just a trifle slyly. “But I never did anything.”

But it won’t wash. She knows, though she won’t admit it, that Dr Kissinger has not gone and will never go where she has gone, that the scientists and the shamans have not done what she has done. Into the spaceship, Granny.

I can only add — indeed — into the spaceship!