There is a quote attributed to the American feminist Gloria Steinem - not that I care much for American feminists, but this quote is full of wisdom. It goes like this -- Life is Time and Time is all there is.
Time in Arabic is called Al-Waqt as in direct Time. Al-Zaman as in past and present Time (also can mean Epoch) and Al-Dahr as Destiny or Fate Time.
Sometimes the Absolute is referred to as Al-Dahr too. There is a Hadith that says to the effect - Do not complain about Dahr/Time, for God is Time.
Interesting correlating analogies, don't you think ?
It is also said that Time erases everything, that Time is the greatest of all erasers...
I remember when I was a kid and just started going to school, at the beginning of every school year, I had this ritual, usually accompanied by my father, to go shop for stationary -- writing pads, pens, pencil sharpeners, rulers and rubber erasers...we had no computers then and we had no cancel or delete tabs either. It was all done by hand.
I use to love this time of the year, right before the school start. Shopping for stationery was exciting for me. I still find myself lingering at the stationery section in stores and supermarkets...
My turn on as a kid were rubber erasers. I wanted them all. Pink, blue, green, white..different shapes and colors. My father would say - how many erasers do you need ? one is enough. And I'd go - no please daddy, let me have one more...
I loved the fact that I could erase things with a brush of my hand. Most of the time I opted for pencil because it was most easy to erase, to erase it's marks...
I remember then blowing on the piece of paper in front of me and see the bits of used rubber blown away, along with the innumerable errors and mistakes made on my class notebook. One quick move of the hand, and they were gone, all gone...I had erased them all.
Sometimes the rubber eraser was of poor quality, and I would not get the desired results...marks will be left on the paper, like some guilty cues or sometimes the paper was too thin and the hard rubber left holes right where I wanted the mistakes to disappear...
I learned earlier on, from my obsession with erasers, that I will never have full control on what I could keep or do away with...
Some things just refused to leave my paper...and later on, refused to leave my mind and heart...and they were there to stay for a long time...they became part of me and I became part of them...
They are here to stay, for as long as Time decides...and until It decides otherwise...
Picture : Iraqi photographer Nadhem Ramzi.
