HEALTH PLUS:The passing of time can give us a true sense of the importance of events
THE POWER of theatre to entertain, inform, challenge and reassure is demonstrated once more in Anton Chekhov's play Three Sisters, which is currently being staged in a version by Brian Friel at our National Theatre, The Abbey.
Among many of the exchanges between the characters that might be extracted and analysed for their psychological portent is a scene in Act One, when the dialogue focuses on the passage of time and the meaning of time's passage in the present and in the future.
The three sisters are being reintroduced to Colonel Alexander Vershinin, a family friend who last met them when they were children. They are trying to remember him, he is trying to reconcile his visual memory of them with their appearance as adults, and they are telling him about their mother's death.
Masha, one of the three sisters, says the unsayable and articulates what is usually only allowed to reside in the unconscious or in the most intimate confidences of the heart - that is, that the memory of her dead mother is fading, that she is "beginning to forget her face".
With this realisation comes an understanding of her own fate and the fate of all people. "They won't remember us either. We'll be forgotten," Masha says to Vershinin. "Yes, we'll be forgotten. That's our destiny, we can't do anything about it," Vershinin agrees. "What seems to us serious and significant and really important - a time will come when it'll be forgotten or seem unimportant."
There is a reminder in this exchange about the impermanence of life, how time-limited our personal existences are, and how short-lived our memories. There is a reminder that, even among those who love us and outlive us, time can diminish the acuity of their memories until they too die, bringing with them their recollections of those who died before them. It takes but a few generations for the living memory of a person to die with their successors.
This is not necessarily a morbid message. Knowing that time will review, revise or erase the significance of today may help us gain perspective about when, where and how to commit our energies, our emotions, our aspirations and our time. It can help us to keep our worries in proportion. It reminds us not to torture ourselves too much about today, because tomorrow may change everything.
It liberates us to put a boundary around our problems because they will be erased, in any event, by time. There is a reminder in the exchange between Masha and Vershinin, that if we are stressed, obsessed or preoccupied with what seem insurmountable concerns, today's "serious and significant and really important" issues may be relegated by time to inconsequentiality.
A time may come when what once seemed to be serious will no longer seem to be so, when the unforgettable will be forgotten and when the important will be unimportant.
This helps us psychologically - it reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously. It alerts us not to squander our time on what time may reveal to be erroneous or insignificant in the long term.
Because there is a further dimension to the discussion that develops between Masha and Vershinin about how future generations will judge the past. "We absolutely can't know what exactly will be regarded as sublime and important and what will be thought pathetic and ridiculous," Vershinin says. "Didn't the discoveries of Copernicus, or say, Columbus, seem unnecessary at first, ridiculous - and didn't some vacuous nonsense written by a crank seem the truth?"
And here is our next reminder from Chekhov's play. It is that the certainties of our era may be no more than amusing delusions to another epoch. We may be judged by time or we may be forgotten by time, but we should not waste too much time worrying about what time will think of us, because time will take care of that.
Time is one lens through which we look at life and the longer we look, the more we learn. Time teaches. The wisdom of age is acquired by living. Profundity comes with the passage of time, because it reveals the patterns of life. Those advanced in age usually know what will happen because they have seen it happen before.
It is often said - but cannot be said too often - that our psychological wellbeing is well served by remembering that time will ease anguish and diminish pain, and that, if we can hang on when life is grim, time will take care of many things.
- Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is the director of the UCD Student Counselling Services.