There is a story told of a woman named Miriam. She tried to control her life down to the minute. Her calendar was full: meetings, errands, gym sessions, social events, reminders to drink water. Every hour was spoken for, and she felt proud of her efficiency. Yet the more she filled her time, the more anxious she became. A missed train ruined her day; an unexpected phone call shattered her rhythm. When her mother grew ill, all her plans collapsed, and she found herself staring at the hospital clock, powerless. It was then she realized: time was not hers to control. It moved with its own rhythm, indifferent to her schedules.
“There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.”
(Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, NIV)
These verses are among the most famous in Ecclesiastes. They read like poetry, yet their meaning unsettles. Qoheleth is not celebrating harmony; he is confessing the inevitability of change. Life is marked by rhythms beyond our control: birth and death, growth and decay, joy and grief. Human beings are not masters of time but participants in seasons they did not create. Augustine wrestled with this in Confessions, asking: what is time? The past is memory, the future is expectation, the present is a vanishing instant. We live suspended in flux. For him, our restless desire for eternity collides with the fleeting nature of time, and only God can hold both together.
Paul Tillich sharpened this with his distinction between chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time, the schedule Miriam clung to, the succession of minutes and hours. Kairos is the fullness of time, the decisive moment when meaning breaks through, when eternity touches history. Ecclesiastes lists the opposites of human experience as if to say: you cannot command kairos. You cannot dictate when mourning will come or when joy will arrive. You can only learn to live within the rhythm, attentive to its interruptions.
Heidegger, too, saw time as the horizon of human existence. To be human is to be temporal, always moving toward death. Most people, he argued, flee from this awareness into everyday busyness. But authentic existence requires facing finitude: recognizing that each “time” is shaped by the certainty of death.
Charles Taylor, in our age, observes how secular modernity has flattened time into what he calls the “immanent frame.” We live in homogeneous, empty time: the endless tick of clocks, schedules, productivity. But Ecclesiastes resists this flattening. It insists that time is not homogeneous. There are seasons, rhythms, interruptions that defy efficiency.
Simone Weil, mystic and philosopher, adds another angle. For her, time is not merely to be endured but to be waited in. Waiting, she said, is the essence of attention, attending to reality as it unfolds, without trying to control it. To wait is to give up the illusion of mastery and to open oneself to what is given. “A time to weep and a time to laugh” is not a command but an acknowledgment: you cannot force laughter when it is time to weep, and you cannot hold back mourning when it comes. To live truthfully is to accept the given season with attention rather than denial.
The modern condition resists this teaching. We schedule grief out of existence, hide death behind hospital doors, medicate sorrow into silence. We chase productivity as if time could be conquered. Yet anxiety rises precisely because time resists us. We cannot hold onto the joyful season forever; it passes. We cannot prevent the painful season from arriving; it comes unbidden. Miriam’s panic at her disrupted calendar is our collective condition: we live as though chronos were ultimate, but the world refuses to obey.
Qoheleth does not offer a solution but a perspective: life is not meaningless because of change, but meaningless if we expect time to stabilize itself. Seasons pass. The point is not to master them but to recognize them. Augustine would remind us that only the eternal can anchor the flux. Tillich would urge us to look for kairos, moments where the eternal breaks into the temporal. Heidegger would press us to live authentically by remembering our finitude. Taylor would caution us against reducing life to empty, secular time. Weil would challenge us to wait attentively, even in suffering.
What we can learn from this: do not imagine you can make time your servant. It will not obey. Instead, learn to discern its seasons. Accept that joy will pass, and therefore savor it. Accept that sorrow will come, and therefore prepare your soul to endure it. Do not expect every moment to be productive, for there is also a time to be silent, to mourn, to rest. To live wisely is not to abolish the seasons but to attend to them truthfully.
Miriam, in the story, never regained perfect control of her calendar. But she learned to see her days differently. A missed train was no longer catastrophe but interruption. Her mother’s illness became not only sorrow but a call to presence. Slowly she discovered that the fullness of life was not in controlling time, but in receiving it. And perhaps that is the Teacher’s gift: not an escape from the flux, but the courage to live within it, knowing there is a time for everything, but not forever for anything.