So Time, the wave, enfolds me in its bed,

Or Time, the bony knife, it runs me through.

Fiumanka Regatta, CC0 Public Domain.

I saw them frequently beginning in my first year at university, 1989, while hurrying between lectures. Two lines of verse spray-painted on the rear of the University of Sydney’s chemistry building.

They stimulated my imagination (though not enough to think about transferring from engineering to literature). Whose words were they? (This was before the world wide web.) And how should I understand their grappling with time and mortality?

Looking back, I can see why those lines grabbed the attention of my younger self. Time passed, and I had no clear sense of it. I knew that time was coming for me like a bony knife (flowing relentlessly, like a hundred yachts), yet it seemed unreal, outside my world, like a monster from a scary story. I’d not yet lost a loved one, and had no intuitive sense of time bringing death and decay.

Time leaves the lovely moment at his back,

Eager to quench and ripen, kiss or kill

The moment’s world it was; and I was part,

Fleshless and ageless, changeless and made free.

‘Fool, would you leave this country?’ cried my heart,

But I was taken by the suck of sea.

The gulls go down, the body dies and rots,

And Time flows past them like a hundred yachts.

Most of the work that I do – with myself and with clients – comes down to moments. In particular, being to some degree present and engaged with this moment, rather than swept along by time. And while my approach involves awareness, techniques and exercises (to help clients stop procrastinating and begin acting), Slessor uses the beauty of language to make vivid our relationship with time.

Perhaps over time my coaching work will include more poetry.

Kenneth Slessor (1901 – 1971) was an Australian poet, journalist and official war correspondent in World War II. – Wikipedia