life’s pauses

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust, unburnish’d, do not to shine in use,
Life piled on life
Were all too little,
and of one to meLittle remains”.
(from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”)

 A s a philosphy of life and living, the above lines certianly can’t be beat. TO live a full life and a useful one has been the theme of many a writer’s work. Only cowards shy away from looking life straight in the face and accepting whatever it has to mete out to you.

I had always prided myself on trying to live by these favorite lines of mine. I had always though i succeeded in making every phase of my life, whatever it brought, a more welcome and greater challenge on my resourcefulness than the previous phase. But this time last year, i was so steeped in loneliness and self-pity that i did not think a pause was “dull”. I did not even think it good enough. I wanted a full stop. Period. I though that even to breathe was too much of a painful effort.

But thank God for the many chores of daily existence that clamor for attention. Chores that heretofore i had looked on with disdain as too trivial for me to even think about. These, i believed in the arrogance of my youth, in the “lustihead of my powers “, were not the stuff that Ulysses had in mind. These are not what he meant by the high adventures of life and living, adventures that need the “burnish’ed shining sword ” of action.

Tonight, as i look back on the past year, i realize that indeed we cannot pause, “make an end”. There are too many things that one has to do from day to day. Hold the baby on one’s lap while her mother is in the kitchen; kiss better a three-year-old’s bump on the forehead; walk the dog out; listen to a friend’s rants and raves on the phone, or even just sit drowsily and watch the lazy afternoon slipping quitely by. All these, prosaic and ordinary things that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had in mind of “everyday’s most quiet need by sun and candleligth “, must be done. Someone must do them and maybe there is nobody else but oneself.

To know that one is needed for any reason whatsoever, even just for being oneself and being there, is the most healing though that can fill the spirit. Also, conversely, we must make it known that we need others. That the other whom that we need must be made to know how much we need him. Perhaps he too will feel this healing of the spirit. It seems we can never get done with life and living. No matter if of one’s last lifetime little remain; we always say, “A little while i fain would linger yet “, for is it not so that we all have “promises to keep”, and “miles to go before i sleep “.