I wish I could do that – seize the time and place no trust in tomorrow. Difficult, though, when that stubborn illusion of personal immortality that gets one through childhood and youth finally yields to a sense of timespan and fragility.

And yet, between the jumping-at-shadows bouts of vulnerability when a sudden awareness of the body’s incapacities against the vitality of the consciousness bring gloom, I can still take heart. Yes, I keep forgetting names (and I understand that this is where the mental dereliction begins), but I can think and feel as passionately as ever. Age appears not to have significantly diminished what my headmaster described in the 17-year-old me as ‘an overbalanced sense of justice’. And a powerful sense of a spiritual dimension remains firmly in place alongside a quiet certainty that there is no God. I take great pleasure in the company of my friends; I laugh a lot; I read constantly; I’m writing steadily again; music, in the playing and the listening, continues to excite and move me in equal measure; and I am aware each day that I have much loved family immediately about me or close enough to see and/or hear whose years cover the spectrum from the horizon right up to a shoreline not so very far away from where I stand.

…

I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little.
Sheila Kaye-Smith.

[We] get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Paul Bowles

“t’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.
George Harrison

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Matthew 6:34

There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Jean-Paul Sartre

The word “now” is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.
Arthur Miller ‘After the Fall’)

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot

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