doctor's life support

8th October: Man: a Breath, a Shadow

Man is like a breath, his days are like a passing shadow. Psalm 144:4

One of the strange paradoxes of life is that the longer it goes on, the shorter it seems. When I was a child and a teenager, I felt that I had been alive for aeons. When I married and graduated at the age of 25, life seemed to stretch ahead unendingly. Now, at 47, when I am at least halfway through my clinical life, I realise a difference has crept up on me. For instance, recently I met a colleague who is near retirement. His wife looked an old lady. Nevertheless, I can remember her as an attractive young woman with two toddlers.

It is not important to consider the transience of life when we are young and it seems unending. Modern physicists tell us that time, space and matter are all inter-related and were created together at, by definition, the beginning of time as we know it. This makes it easier for me to see our temporal existence as something transcended by a different unchanging form of existence called eternity.

Of course, we have not the mental equipment to grasp these concepts any more than an intelligent dog can grasp the concepts of higher mathematics. But we can and should learn to pray with the Psalmist:

Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting my life is!
Behold, thou hast made my days a few handbreaths,
and my lifetime is as nothing in thy sight.
Surely every man stands as a mere breath.

Ps 39:4-5

Further reading: Ps 39.

DAB