The years between

By Klaus Döring

The Years Between (1946) is a British film directed by Compton Bennett and starring Michael Redgrave, Valerie Hobson and Flora Robson in an adaptation of the 1945 play The Years Between by Daphne du Maurier. It was shot at the Riverside Studios.

“Evocative details about family, friends, writers and landscapes make Lynn Cohen’s Between the Years vibrant and moving. Her landscapes are filled with memories that balance between nostalgia and revelation, as we journey with the poet through the cycle of searching, finding, losing, and recovering. Loss and aging dance with youth and fulfillment, creating poems of lyrical intensity and surprise. Look for “Affairs are not for the Faint Hearted,” “Gretchen,” “Colossus,” and “City of Glass.” Lynn’s poems remind us that an epic unfolds between birth and death.”

New Year’s Day is the pause between the past and the future — after the grand retrospectives of Hanukkah and Christmas but before the resolutions and predictions kick in. This is one of the few moments in the year when we are almost forced to contemplate the strange propulsion of time that carries us along through life. You can choose your own metaphor. Do the years feel like combers rolling onto the beach, one after the other? Do you feel as if you’re swimming downstream with the current of a mighty river? Or does this winter-shift from one year to the next feel like a portage through dark woods between two lakes?

From time to time most of us aspire to episodes of timelessness, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Parents look at their children, or we look at our parents, and there is a horrifying thrill in how rapidly they change, a thrill that makes us want to stop time, as much for ourselves as for them. There are days so beautiful, so productive, so happy that we would like to fix them in our minds for good as the prototype of all days — while knowing that what makes those days so memorable is also the fact that they slide past as if by their own momentum. But the momentum is ours, too. It’s tempting to believe on New Year’s Day that we are standing still while the world rushes on, as if we were passengers in one of Einstein’s thought experiments. But who is to say that we aren’t the ones rushing onward, and the world is trying desperately to keep up? Time’s arrow is embedded in the very nature of this universe, and it’s a good thing, too, because otherwise everything would be so disorganized.

Many times we are really in too much of a hurry while feeling uncomfortable if we notice how time flies. Yes, my late grandmother was right, when she said: The older you become, the faster time passes by. My late mother told us the same. Yes, I am 70 now. I can only strongly agree with her.

When I was still a teenager, I was longing to be an adult already. Later, I enjoyed listening to my late grandmother (born 1898!) stories such as “Once upon a time” or “When I was young” from her life yesterday’s life.

Christmas is gone, if you might read this. The next turn of the year is just around the corner. For most of us it’s time to come to our senses. The future prospects smile at us already. What might the New Year bring us? Is life in the future easier, nicer, more charming and more fulfilled compared to the present or the almost finished 2023? The thoughts fill me with horror, because tragicomic future visions can easily blur away our present day.

A possible topsy-turvy world of a golden youth tries to let us forget that also the past has had its shares of disappointments, pains, tears, darkness, tricky as well as desperate days… yes, lost days, irretrievable time… .We dream our impossible dreams from last year, this 2023 to the future and vice versa. We forget that between yesterday and tomorrow is our valuable presence. Well, now well then – if we know how to fulfill this period.

I will be taking a short break from many tasks and appointments. I will be trusting in God, because He takes care of me and my future.  Don’t allow the daily hectic and stress of this season kill your senses.

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