Our Best Time
“sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory” — Theodor Seuss “Ted” Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
In the movie The Green Mile there is a scene where death row prisoner Arlen Bitterbuck (played by Graham Greene) awaits his execution in the electric chair.
Whilst sitting with prison officer Paul Edgecomb (played by Tom Hanks), Arlen reflects on his life.
Arlen is sad about his life coming to an end and the realisation that the best part of his life is over.
Arlen is hopeful that the afterlife may allow him to revisit the best time in his life -
Arlen : Do you think if a man sincerely repents on what he done wrong, he might get to go back to the time that was happiest for him and live there forever? Could that be what Heaven’s like?
Paul : I just about believe that very thing.
Arlen : I had me a young wife when I was eighteen. We spent our first summer in the mountains, made love every night. Then she’d lay there after, bare breasted in the fire light, and we’d talk sometimes ’til the sun come up … that was my best time.
Like Arlen the problem many of us have is that we don’t appreciate what we have until after it is gone. The stoic philosopher Seneca[i] wrote the following passage around 49 AD — “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
In a deathbed letter to his infant grandson Scott, Clyde Stanley Shields[ii] wrote the following passage — “Most important of all is ability to savor life, to taste of it in as many variances as you can — while you can. Life never looks so short as when you look back on it. Unfortunately you cannot do this until it has passed you by. So, as you go through life, don’t overlook the “Lily in the Field,” the newborn puppy, the fledgling bird — for they are as much (or more) of life as the tall buildings, the shiny automobiles and the possessions we tend to place so much importance upon. If you can do just this much — life will be more meaningful for you.”
Seneca[iii] reminds us that we are “dying daily” and that “certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness.”
[i] On The Shortness of Life, Lucius Annaeus Seneca
[ii] Shields was the Chief Test Pilot on the Manhattan Project. The letter to his grandson was written on 7th October 1974
[iii] Moral Letters to Lucilius — Letter 1 On Saving Time, Lucius Annaeus Seneca
