The Quest: Serving Others Before Time Runs Out

People ask – why are you running for governor? My answer is this: Time is short; my debts to the past are many. I was given skills, breath, health, and energy to fix what is broken. Others did this for me. We must be “equal to our time.” That is the quest.

More, of course, remains unsaid. Beyond principles, policies, debts to the past, and a need to pass blessings forward – there is the “tick of time,” acting in the nick of time.

These days it is odd to hear anyone in politics speak of intergenerational obligations, talk about anything other than their race, offer any real reflections, but here they are.

An old Musketeer named Stephen Grellet served a French king in the late 1700s. One day he had an epiphany. He dropped his sword, picked up a Bible, and headed for America. For the rest of his life, after our Revolution, he ministered in our hospitals and prisons.

Born Catholic, he became a Quaker, felt the need to step up, wanted to be equal to his time, live with high purpose, do what he could to help others. He never looked back. Few of us will ever be a missionary, few ever could, but serving others is within us all.

My fondness for this musketeer-turned-missionary comes – I think – from his famous prayer: “I shall pass through this world but once. Any good I can do or kindness I can show … let me do it now. Let me not defer or delay it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

He did just that, gave what he could, used each day well, his only regret not being able to do more. He knew what it meant to be kind, to center on that, and to watch the time.

Two other writers I like wrote about “time” and how fast it passes: Rudyard Kipling and Robert Frost. They lived in the same time but apparently never met. Kipling’s poem “The Way Through the Woods” reminds Mainers of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

Wrote Kipling:

“They shut the road through the woods
      Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
      And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
      Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
     And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
      And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
      Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
      Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
      Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
      And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
      Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
      As though they perfectly knew
      The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.”

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” is similar:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Bottom line: Time is short; our debts to the past are many. Given skills, breath, health, and energy to fix things, as others did, we should. Being “equal to our time” is the real quest.