Fui, sum, ero - I was, I am, I will be

I watch the flame of a candle on a bookshelf next to me. It flickers, it bends, it sways with the wind flowing through the open window. If I capture it in a photograph, I see only one still image. But in truth, the flame is never still. Born every moment, dying every moment and yet I call it the same flame. Past, present, future all dissolve into one continuous burning, one eternal becoming.

Later I remember my old days. Once, on a long train ride, I met an old man, hair white and curly, hands wrinkled, face weathered. But in his eyes, the mischief of a child still played. As we exchanged words, he laughed: “I am not seventy. I am seven, and seventeen, and seventy all at once. Every age I have lived still breathes in me.” In that moment, I saw time not as a road behind me, but as a wheel I carry beneath my feet.

Between that candle and that man, I feel time’s paradox, how each moment is fresh and forgotten, how memory and anticipation swirl in the same breath. The flame calls me to presence. The old man reminds me of continuity. And I realize: the 'Self' does not live in one moment alone. It dances across ages, gathering echoes, weaving them into a tapestry that has no beginning, no end.

I remember the child I was, the youth I became, the dreams I carried and abandoned. I remember the losses that shaped me, the loves that vanished, the voices that whispered. All of it is mine, not as separate chapters, but as one living thread. Each sorrow, each delight, pulses in the same center.

Time has touched me, but it has not undone me.

And I whisper to myself:

i was the silence in my mother’s womb,

i am the breath writing these words,

i will be the dust returning to the earth,

nothing is lost,

nothing is separate,

existence sings in three tenses,

but the song is one.

“Fui, sum, ero - I was, I am, I will be.”

I often see beauty, a petal floating in the breeze, a child’s laughter, the dying light on a wall and I know: time does not steal. Time gifts. It gives me more moments, more perspective, more ways to feel the depth of “I am.”

And perhaps the mystics were right: what I was has not vanished, what I am is not confined, what I will be is already here. To live fully is not to choose between past, present, or future, but to recognize the thread that binds them into one eternal now.

In closing, I remember what Buddha's word , “let go of the past, let go of the future, let go of the present, and cross over to the farther shore of existence.”

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© 2025 Beyond Silence. Written by 'the one listening.'

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