An Extract from Four Quartets by TS Eliot

I read this extract recently in a book and the words have been reverberating in my mind. Seek your own meaning in the words, so that the poem becomes a private conversation between the poet and you.

Burnt Norton

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

Indeed, everything that has happened in the past and everything that is happening now, would have an impact on what will happen in the future. We are shaped by our own unique experiences and the nooks and cannies that life throws in our paths. I'm of the opinion that everything happens for a reason, you just have to hang on in there to wait for the reason to reveal itself. It's not a fatalistic view, but that of having faith that there is a greater objective to be achieved by living through the good and bad times.

Alas, all time is unfortunately, unredeemable. So grab hold of the present and let it waste not, for it will determine the future.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

So many of us are guilty of asking ourselves the painful question, "What if?". "What if I hadn't done that?" "What if I did that?" We live in constant agony of what might have been. But the hard truth is, what happened, happened. Banishing ourselves to the eternal black hole of regret only brings misery. We will thus be unable to live in the present, but live in the perpetual shadow of the past. Speculating and imagining what might have been serves absolutely no purpose, and thus says the last verse:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.