St Augustine tried to understand the quantification of time. But not just he: many other thinkers over the years have tried to understand things like: "There are twenty-four hours in a day." Or, "There are seven days in a week," and so forth. The calendars that have been created over the years have been as a result of humans trying to control the most uncontrollable thing in the world. They have been about humans trying to make objective sense of a seemingly senseless phenomenon. A statement like: "Time and tide wait for no one" shows how it is that, in the bid to understand time, characteristics have perennially been adduced by which to conceptualize it. And yet time remains unknowable, unsearchable and all-powerful. Time remains the controller of destiny, and the "healer of all wounds." Time remains the measure of existence and the announcer of progress or deterioration.
We should wait for time. Awed by its power, we cannot afford to challenge time. We must rather wait for it. We must give time its due respect and its mastery. We cannot overtake it. We may anticipate it, but never overtake it. By the way, isn't the word "anticipate" such a beauty? By way of etymology, it comes from the Latin words: "ante," and "capere." Ante is a pre-fix that means before. Capere is a verb that means to take. In ancient Rome, learning or knowing or understanding was considered a form of taking. I guess it is in this spirit that when we say we grasp something we mean we understand it, and grasp is a form of take. And so ante-capere refers to taking before, or better still knowing before, or simply foreknowledge: knowing what will happen before it actually does happen.
Anticipation should be done with humility, though. We can never be so proud that we become clairvoyants, knowing and seeing the future in such clear and predictable terms that we begin to dictate for it. Even when we anticipate, we should carefully allow for time and the course of events to proceed differently, if time so chooses. We simply need to be patient. Patience in this regard may be defined as the humility we experience in cognizance of the awesomeness of time, and the realization that we may never overtake it and, even when we anticipate it, we may never alter or best it. Patience is an attribute of the scientific mind. This is the sort of mind which, in contrast to the artistic one, plans and organizes and then carries on. It is the sort of mind that, in cognizance of the awesomeness of time and the realization that we can never overtake it even if we may anticipate it, always creates paradigms for more easily understanding what may be accomplished in a given period.
Patience is important for progress. All things happen in time. And so, progress is related to time, and if our attitude toward time is one of respect, then our attitude toward progress will be one of respect as well. This means that patient people achieve more than people who are impatient. Patient people don't give up. They are not the sort of people who miss something because they failed to wait just one more day for it. They are not the people who throw in the towel when the treasure was just one more inch below the ground. Had they rather used the towel to wipe their face and continued digging, they would very likely have struck the gold. Patient people are never tired of waiting. They know that life itself is a sort of endless wait. And concerning waiting, the bible says: "Those that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and shall not be weary. They shall walk and shall not faint" (Isa. 40:31). Let us all be patient, and in our patience, let us keep blessing the Lord God, and fervently praising him all our days. Amen.
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