Time is like a river flowing endlessly

Time is like a river flowing endlessly, but man has broken it up into three parts: the past, the present, and the future. The past is heavily burdened, and the future he does not know. Giving significance to life, a life that has no meaning, no purpose, no beauty, he says, “Let me live in the present.” He invents a philosophy of life of the present. But to live in the present, man must understand the past and the future. It’s a movement; you can’t take this river and say, “ I live just there.” It’s like a river that is flowing, and in this stream of time man is caught. Unless there is an end to time, there is no ending to sorrow.

Every human being is caught in time. I am not talking about time by the watch, chronological time which does influence thought, but of time at a different level, time as a movement of the infinite past, moving through the present to some future. As long as I am caught in that, there is no end to sorrow. I say to myself, “I’ll be happy tomorrow; I’ll escape from my present misery, my deep inner psychological disturbance which brings about sorrow. I’ll gradually get over it, forget it, rationalize it, escape from it or invent some future hope.” But to end suffering I must understand time. Time must come to an end, because thought has created sorrow, thought is time, thought has said, “I’m lonely; I’m of incapable of functioning; I’m not loved; my ambition, my capacity is not fulfilling itself. I must have time to do this, and time to achieve, to become, to change.”

J K The Collected Works vol XVI, pp 141-142