Watch the video before you read on.
It takes a minute and a half.
It is worth it.
It is a whole life drawn as glowing threads on a dark sky. At the bottom, at zero, four threads stand waiting - grandmother, mother, father, grandfather - and then a little yellow thread lights up right between them.
That is you.
From the side come threads you did not choose yourself - a friend from the first years of school, a childhood friend, someone from upper secondary, your first love. The one who perhaps both opened and broke your heart for the first time.
They go along for a stretch, and then they swing out of the picture again, just as quietly as they came.
Around twenty-four a thread comes in that stays. Your partner for life. At thirty a new little thread lights up right beside you.
And along the way, without any fuss being made about it, some of the threads that were there from the beginning go out. First grandfather. Then grandmother. Later father. Later mother. But they do not disappear. They remain as stars at the top of the sky while you walk on beneath. In the end your own thread ends - and you become a star yourself. The little thread that arrived at thirty carries on from there alone.
I turned 52 this summer.
The year before last I was 28.
Five years ago I was 18.
That is how it can feel some days at least, and it is not because I have counted wrong. It is because time is not the same length all the way through.
When you are a child, or at least when I was, a summer holiday was a whole lifetime. When you are fifty, a summer is something you manage to notice just before it is over. I have not met a single person over forty-five who has not at some point stood there saying the same thing - "where on earth did the time go?"
That is one half of the video - that it all goes fast.
The other half is harder to see, and that is why the video draws it - that we believe the threads standing beside us will stand there forever. We know perfectly well that they will not. We know it with our heads. But we live as if they will, and that is the wildest illusion a human being can walk around with - that there is enough time. That time never ends. That the conversation can be had next time. That the visit can wait until after Christmas. That you will surely get said what you want to say, once things calm down a bit.
I have lived in that delusion myself for most of my life, and I do not think I came up with it on my own. The spirit of the age convinced us that nothing was more important than ourselves. That we should focus on me, me, me - and put me, my needs and what mattered to me at the top. In the belief that the key lay there.
And if the key lies there, then the rest follows by itself - then the others can wait. Creation. The child. The relationship. The family. you will surely get said what you want to say, once things calm down a bit. Then the visit is something you make when you yourself are ready. Then the conversation is something you get round to once you have sorted out your own stuff first.
I spent many - FAR too many - years sorting out my own stuff first. And meanwhile there were people standing beside me waiting for me to be done.
My experience is that things do not calm down. Because that is not how it works. Here. The threads go out while you are busy with something else.
"Oh... I didn't make it in time.."
I believe - and it is a belief, and it is probably much older than me - that if we use the time we have been given rightly, then we use life rightly. And if we do that consistently all the way through, then life is exactly and precisely long enough for us to take it all with us before we have to move on. Not everything we could have taken with us.
But everything we were meant to. Everything we came here for.
And that part, I know now, is not my idea.
In one of the oldest texts we have, there is a prayer in a single line -
"Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."
Notice what it does not say. It does not say "teach us to get more days". Nor does it say "teach us to get more done". It says - "teach us to number them". Because it is only when you know they can be counted that you start spending them on what matters most.
A Human being who thinks it has endlessly many days spends them on anything at all. A Human being who knows it does not begins to choose. Consciously.
And if you watched it to the end, then this, the last image of the video, becomes interesting.
When the threads have gone out and become stars, something happens at the very end - lines are drawn between them, and they become a constellation. Grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, your wife or husband, yourself, your son or daughter.
A figure. A pattern that can only be seen when it is all over, and that none of those who were part of it could see while they were in it.
So the question is left - who draws the lines?
The dead do not. The son does not either, he is standing in the middle of his own thread and cannot see the picture from above. The lines are drawn from outside. By one who sees the whole sky at once, and who has done so since before the first thread was lit.
That is the Christian frame around this, and it is actually not the least bit complicated.
Your life is not yours. It is given. Time is not something you own, it is something you have been handed, a fixed amount whose size you do not know, and which you have to hand back. And the people who walk beside you for a stretch of the road are not yours either. They are lent. They are just as given as you are yourself, and just as lent, and they are taken home again when their time is spent.
And then the best part - what remains when the threads go out is not a void. It is a picture that someone else has drawn, and that someone else remembers, even when there is no one left down here to remember it.
"Others stay in your sky forever", the video says. That is beautiful, but it is not quite enough. Because your sky goes out one day too. So it is not your sky they stay in. It is His.
What is worth holding up in front of yourself every single day is not "where did the time go". You cannot do anything about that question. It is the other one - are you spending the time that is your life on what and who matter most to you - while they are still standing beside you and not hanging above you.
Because the threads go out while you are busy.
And the lines get drawn whether you made it in time or not.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good week, friends ❤️
Let us make the most of it and pull UPWARD in everything inside and around us.
While we are here.
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Video from the talented @creative_hassanali on Instagram.
