✧༺ Becoming Constellations ༻✧

We Are Always Late

2 min read

We Are Always Late

“I’ve always been late to things, and I quite often thought that I was lagging to engage and relate to people.”

The Experience of Belatedness

There is a peculiar temporal structure to consciousness: we are always arriving after the fact. The moment of recognition comes too late — the event has already occurred, the opportunity has already passed, the meaning has already crystallized before we grasp it.

This is not a failure but a fundamental condition. Hegel understood this when he wrote that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk” — philosophy, reflection, understanding always come after the fact.

Don’t Assume Things as Given

Don’t assume things as given. Don’t be mad at others for not meeting your expectations. Be the master of your own destiny.

How to be happy in a world in which you are critical of — that’s what we are subject to. The only way, I would say, is to work exactly on the gap between what is and what you wish were.

The Gap as Space for Action

This gap — between the actual and the possible, between being and becoming — is not merely a source of frustration. It is the very space where action becomes possible. If we were not late, if we did not experience the gap between our understanding and our situation, there would be no impetus for transformation.

The revolutionary insight is that this lateness, this structural belatedness, can be transformed from a burden into a resource. Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (now-time) is precisely this: the recognition that every moment contains within it the possibility of revolutionary transformation, precisely because we are always catching up with ourselves.

Un poble que lluita no mor

A people who struggle do not die. The struggle itself is a form of temporal engagement — a refusal to accept the givenness of the present, an insistence that the future remains open.

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” — Walter Benjamin