Are you holding a grudge? About?

I have reached the stage in life when grudges belong to a distant past. Some of that past I still regret, but I have come to accept most of it as the normal rites of passage through which human beings must pass, if they are to grow and develop. This acceptance also comes from the understanding that the steps that led me to my current life and situation, were beneficial, even when I didn’t think they were at the time.

Garcilaso de la Vega once wrote: Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado / y a ver los pasos por do me ha traído, hallo, según por do anduve perdido, que a mayor mal pudiera haber llegado. The Wikipedia translation offers us this – When I stop to contemplate my state and see the steps through which they have brought me, I find, according to where I was lost, that it could have come to a greater evil.

That said, I have learned to see the lesser evil in things that actually happened and the greater evils into which I might have fallen. I remember bearing grudges, but I feel that I have now set them aside. Reading John O’Donohue’s book Anam Cara, for the fourth or fifth time, has helped me to achieve that state of mind.

Some things do annoy me though. Speed reading is one of them. Well, not speed reading but the application of speed reading to any and all situations. In today’s Guardian, for example, I read that – “A lot of people, myself included, complain that they don’t have time to read but everyone has time to read a poem. You can read Ozymandias, for example, in just 17 seconds.”

One of the first things that I did in Grad School at U of T was to take a speed reading course. I found it absolutely essential in order to read and process the quantity of new material that was thrown at me by my profs. In my undergraduate education (Bristol University) I was told that “It is better to read one poem a hundred times than to read a hundred poems once.” As a poet, and a student of poetry, I prefer to dwell on a poem, to absorb its essence, its meaning, its subtleties, its associative fields, rather than to gulp it down in 17 seconds, for example, and then move on to something else. The poet and dreamer who live within me need that time to re-create, poeticize, and dream.

“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare, no time to stand beneath the boughs and stare as long as sheep or cows,” wrote W. H. Davies, author of Autobiography of a Super Tramp.

I realize just how much our lives have speeded up, how we are inundated by information, how we drown in sound-bytes, memes, and mini-clips. I also know that, however fast we read, we will never take it all in, not in one lifetime. Sometimes, less is more, slower is faster, we need to take time, to make time, to stand and stare. Seamus Heaney expresses it well – “Some time, take the time…” I don’t hold a grudge against those who can’t, or won’t, make and take that time. But I truly believe that many, many people would benefit by doing so. I also believe that a benevolent society would allow many more people to do just that.

Meanwhile, I will agree with the Guardian columnist that reading a poem in 17 seconds is much better than reading no poetry at all. So, some time, take the time….