Time is a cruel teacher

There is an old saying that goes something like Time is a cruel teacher because she gives the test before we have the answers.

I have been thinking a lot about time lately. How relatively short it is in the whole scheme of things. I mean a lifetime is really pretty short when you think about it. The recent news of Al & Tipper Gore separating after 40 years of marriage kinda got me thinking again about how fast things change. Last year about this time I was facing graduation, my party, and a summer full of a lot of fun. All of a sudden, we are flash forwarded to the here and now...2010 and it's June, again. Even though so much happened in those 365 days, it feels like it went by in the blink of an eye. I imagine Al & Tipper feel that way.

Sometimes all we have to do is brave the storm a little while and suddenly it breaks and things settle down, get into a rhythm, a pattern...they become "normal". I think that's where I lose it a little...I'm not very happy or comfortable with "normal" or a set routine. I like a little bit of chaos, a little bit of something to shake up my days....it's crazy to think Al and Tipper spent more time being married than alone....although some will argue they have both been alone for many many years now.

I wonder what 3 months from now will bring? Heck 3 days from now my life could completely change. I am really exhausted from trying to figure things out...trying to figure out where I should be, what I should be doing, where I should be at...it's wearing on a soul. I want to give up but that seems to be the lazy way out. I would like to find some middle ground...some place soft to land that isn't soul sucking but offers enough excitement and variety to keep me going.

I got a book for my birthday and I have yet to read but there is this quote in the beginning I just can't get out of my head. It's by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be a unit; not to be
reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong...

To which we belong. That's the part I keep going over in my head. Is it saying that I am a disgrace because I am have not born fruit? That I am not a unit? That I am one in thousands that is a party of one and there is where I belong? I am not sure what it's saying, but it is somehow speaking to me. I must really read more of him to figure him out.

Time is indeed a cruel teacher, what is this person from the past trying to share with me now in the present? How do we learn these lessons oh teacher?