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A Poem on Time and the Play of Life
“Bound to our own, and to the sweet dreams of our own, to every hope there clings a despair — who can understand it, who knows its language?”
About this teaching
This life, this world, is but a play of all of time. Play on, keep playing your part, while still you can. In this world, time is mighty above all.
The question this teaching puts
Bound to our own, and to the sweet dreams of our own, to every hope there clings a despair — who can understand it, who knows its language?
Chapter 22 — A Poem on Time and the Play of Life
Chapter 22 of 35 — a single teaching, 2 min in total.
Tags
Time, and the play it makes of a life.
Kala — time — is close to a character in the Mahabharat. It is invoked at the great reversals, and the epic keeps returning to the idea that the actors are less in charge of the story than they believe. Bhishma choosing the hour of his own death is the exception that makes the rule visible.
The framing is not fatalism, and the difference matters. Nobody in the epic is excused by time; they are simply not permitted to imagine they command it. What remains theirs is the quality of what they do inside it.
