A Man In His Life

Not very much today, but I felt the urge some reason to visit my Open Diary and look over the small number of posts I had since I started it a couple of years ago..only 14 entries, but some pretty good writing resides there. I ran across this interesting item that I thought I'd share here. I was listening to NPR one day back in March 2008 and I came across this:

I liked this a lot and it speaks volumes. The author belongs to the New Humanist movement which is a new way to say that you're an agnostic. I liked this idea.

"A Man In His Life"

by Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn't have time in his life to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have a season for every purpose.
Ecclesiastes Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse,
to eat and to digest what history takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks,
when he finds he forgets,
when he forgets he loves,
when he loves he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul is very professional.
Only his body remains forever an amateur.
It tries and it misses,
gets muddled,
doesn't learn a thing, drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.