You have all the time in the world!

The sense of having only a limited time causes many people to fret and worry. The most valuable thing people can spend is time. Simply because there has to be an ending, they imagine that they peak at 50 or 40 even 20. An elderly US senator once commented on how the attitude of so little time suffocates the human spirit: “Most people say that as you get old you have to give up things. I think you get old because you give up things.”
Our world is made human by people with a quite different time sense. The great political leaders, scientists, social revolutionaries and great religious leaders, all of them had a very different time sense. The British novelist E.M. Forster once wrote of them: “The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society were eternal. Both assumptions must be accepted if we are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.”
Because they act as if life were eternal, the great ventilators of the human spirit always feel that they have time to be available to others. You can read their attitude in their faces and postures. The person who is at your disposal turns towards you, tilts a head, bends an ear, lights an eye.
What miracles that simple act of being available can work! All of us remember, almost as moments of grace, occasions when people have released our spirits just by lending us a sympathetic half-hour. Remember the elders who set aside a lot of time to be available to the young generation. Can we forget this sacrifice of theirs?
“Being available” is an attempt to put into English the French word disponibilite, the state of being at one’s disposal. Philosopher Gabriel Marcel, borrowing the word from financiers, who speak of “available funds,” coined this usage to describe a rare human quality. Marcel applied it to people who “open a line of credit” to other persons. We should all do that. Each of us should make available to others not what we own, but what we are.
Availability can be brief, but it must be sincere to ventilate the spirit. We find our casual friends saying, “Call me any time. I’m at your disposal.” But will they be on hand without grudging in your moment of crisis? And will they be there to toast, without envy, your good fortune?
Bored and lazy people have time, but may have little to offer. Time is what they want most, but sadly what they use worst. The people most available to us are often the busiest and most important.
Important, yes, but not self-important. Self – important people equate time with money. They are skeptical in relating with people because they lose time and as a result lose money. Gabriel Marcel noted that often people who are burdened with egos, money or degrees allow no one else to enter their inner worlds. They close themselves off. He called this crispation, to describe people who become crisped like dry autumn leaves.
Nothing “crispates” the soul faster than the delusion that it is too late. This delusion permeates our culture. We are told that “physicists do their most creative work before the age of 30.” Crispation makes us hermits. “There is no time!” we rail, and turn our backs on others and thereby on the future. We miss the best things in the world by fretting about the lack of time.
Time is a system of folds which only death can unfold. For many of us it is difficult to come to terms with time. It takes a sense of eternity to make one realise that there is time, time to be available and to create. When we don’t create we are dead
We are starting a new year. Let this year help us change our attitude towards time and people. Let us begin to say that we have enough time for the people who come to us.
Instead of saying we are limited by time and space, can we say we have time for others, and space for others? It begins in choice, I shall make time! I will not be closed off and crisped.
We must, of course, sometimes close the door to be alone with ourselves: alone with thoughts and books and soul and may be God. For only people with a strong inner core can be usefully available to others. Historian Arnold Toynbee called this “withdrawal and return.” In private hours we become the person who will be usefully available to others. Then we can offer them the gift, not of what we have, but of what we are. Be sure, then, that you have all the time in the world and so be available!