There will be time

I walk along the levee as late afternoon turns to evening. The dark gray clouds overhead are roiled and scudding towards the north. I look across the river to trees along the far bank that have mostly lost their leaves for this year.  As the sun nears the horizon, I can see red rays touching the trailing strands of clouds and turning them dark red. Almost the color of blood.

And then the earth turns farther around and in about a minute all is gray again. But there is still light. Along the edges of the earth where the cloaking layer of clouds haven’t reached is an irregular band of yellowing blue. And up, higher, where the clouds are trying to break apart, brightness. And there are electric lights, car lights - signs of human beings everywhere.

I like to walk alone with myself in a world both scarred and beautiful. I mostly see the beauty. What we have done to the earth and to ourselves in our unceasing quest for happiness has already been done. It’s a kind of spilled milk. And we should do better. And it must also be acknowledged that nature, with its order, is also random and arbitrary, often destroying as it builds up.

And, yes, human beings have also managed to do some things right. People are nature too and we sometimes do some things in a harmonious dance with the rest of nature. And so here we are at this moment in time. One part of it all. A little too proud of ourselves as sapient humans. As if we, alone, had created ourselves.

But why should I waste more time railing against human hubris and the wreckage we have left in our wake? The mystery beckons. Why do I see beauty at all? How can what I see as I walk along this man-handled river seem so wondrous to me? What can it all possibly mean?

And now I am possibly leaning too far over that edge, as well. The mystery will have to wait. Better to return to the hard gravel top of the levee under my feet as I walk along the river.

I turn, now following the red tail lights heading across the near side of the bridge into the city. Then I walk underneath the bridge and out onto the other side.

There will be time. Eliot said it in Prufrock. Now I repeat it. There will be time.

I pause, looking out over limestone boulders. The river flows. The quantity of time spent in  watching and waiting seems not very important this evening.

Then, eventually, I head home. The sky – now darkening, a rough gray – is reflected in the river below me as I recross the Kaw River Bridge. Trees, sandbars, the muddy water, the Bowersock hydropower plant. And downtown Lawrence ahead of me. And then, past South Park and Central Middle School, and then onto New Hampshire Street.

I step through the front door. Everything has changed, but I am not astonished that everything appears to be very much the same. Heraclitus wrote more than two thousand years ago that no one can step in the same river twice. I think that he was saying something about time. So very many humans have.

I can walk across the Kaw River Bridge, turn, and walk back home in about an hour. Often it takes longer. But each time I walk - each and every step that I take is taken only once. Time does not wait for me. Or hurry on ahead. Light speeds and appears to stand still. The passage of time is embedded in every place and every thing in the universe. And yet there is so much to notice other than the inexorable passage of time.

I will have supper with my wife. And that time, too, will slip-slide away without our assistance. I am left with more questions than answers.

But I can say this much. The last red rays of a setting sun drew me outward. And the pale yellow light beckoned from the windows of my home.

And I will give Mr. Eliot the last words:

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet…


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There will be time
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