Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. --- I Corinthians

Eternity in Ten Seconds

We stand next to eternity every day of our lives. Some are closer it seems to the profound nature of being in the world than others. They have no need to question their actions. They simply respond to a higher natural order than the rest of us. And so it was for a man named Isidor Howson of Kazabazua, a humble 40-year-old carpenter. 

Isidor is just a man. A man living his life. He had a fairly long drive home from Shawville to Kaz and as he usually does he left his shoes unlaced so he could take them off if he wanted to. That Saturday he hesitated undoing the laces. He didn’t know why he hesitated but he did. But then he untied the laces. Just outside Shawville he saw a house on fire. Two older women were standing by the road. He stopped his truck to help. 

The women were shaken. They told him there was a man inside. He hadn’t come out.

Isidor immediately ran to the house. How many of us would have done that? With the flames on the roof now fierce, the heat rattling the air, the smoke acrid in the wind? Isidor tried the front door, the back door, the windows. Through the front window he could see a man in a chair in the living room. And despite the screaming and banging, the man did not respond, already perhaps overcome by the smoke. Isidor only describes his actions as driven by a higher will than his own perhaps. By right action, by adrenaline, by divine providence. That’s the mystery of men like this. When asked, Isidor confused almost by the question simply says, “it was the right thing to do. I’d do it again."

Isidor went to the front door and began kicking it in. He lost his shoe in the process. His laces were untied. He was cut, bruised and shaken but managed finally to break in. He retrieved his shoe, and just 10 seconds from having broken in the door he reckons, the entire upper floor caved into the living room burying the man in the chair.

Isidor was 10 seconds too late. 

That’s how Isidor told the story. That’s how Isidor remembered the story: he was 10 seconds too late to save the man. If only he had not stopped to get his shoe. If only he had laced them up. If only. And Isidor went home eventually broken and haunted. It was 10 seconds. And that defines a man like Isidor. He did not see it as 10 seconds where he himself could have died (as his friend eventually pointed out to him), but as the time he did not have to save the man. What makes men like this? Who can really know? Just a man. Just a man living his life.

But life has a way of making its profundity manifest. It has a way of teaching us things we don’t understand. For a man like Isidor, who was haunted by those 10 seconds, by the unlaced shoe, there was no comfort really. Only perhaps time would heal. 

Isidor went reluctantly to work the next day at a construction site in Wakefield, exhausted from a sleepless night. Why he happened to be standing right there when his co-worker took a phone call from his wife, Isidor doesn’t know. But that co-worker was from Shawville and his wife told him their neighbour had set the house on fire and then shot himself. Isidor could not have saved the man even if he had had those 10 seconds. These were facts that Isidor may never have known if he hadn’t been standing there to hear it. The details are still under wraps.

Isidor could not have saved the man. Instead he was given 10 seconds of grace. And that 10 seconds saved his own life. That is how providence works. That is the irony, the twist of the archetypal story. Isidor thinks about how he could have died for nothing if he hadn’t lost a shoe.

No longer haunted, but simply sad. It is a story to tell now for Isidor. Not the one he thought it was, but a different one altogether. It is a sad story but a transformative story for him in ways words can’t describe. He is just a man. Living his life, 10 seconds away from eternity.

What then is happiness?

Some of us live on the boundary line, the slow shuffled measured pace between black/white and the known/unknown, the right/wrong, the tragic/comedic, the coward/hero, the stupid and the bright. It is not a striving for equilibrium but a condensation of our divided Being funneled to a finite place on this planet where we roost to watch the affairs of our fellow creatures. It is a precarious vantage point--neither here nor there but in between. It was never a choice we would have made if we had had the choice.

For some of us the leap to a conclusion is a slow emergence from unfathomable depths to make our way in a languid drift to a faraway shore. It is why we are old before our time, for the blustery skies we fly in batter our very souls. It is why we are quiet for our solitude exists in a noisy crowd and has no answer to what it sees. It is bewildered by the pain of others demanding reason and yet others suffocating in emotion. It is partly nature and partly circumstance that held us in what we thought was confusion but was in reality capacity. It was a clarity defined by images and not thought. It was a clarity of emotion and not reason. But the painful translation of that clarity to reason brings depths of understanding for those who live in-between and can suffer the journey on that fragile bridge from here to there.

There are not many who have the time to think. And for those of us who do, it is our curse to do so.
Hence the painters, the poets, the writers, the philosophers, the mystics and the misfits. And even the mad, for they dance and sing and cry and rage in memory and prophesy where most have never been and would never choose to go.

What then is happiness to those who skip-trip to the heavens? And does it even matter. Predestined perhaps to lives of living in between, they play translators to a universe few seek to understand. They bleed their love at daybreak and gather it again at nightfall from the stars to strew across the vast clamoring daylight. They never had a choice.