INSCRIPTION

A prince asked his jeweler to craft him a piece that would carry him in both good times and bad.  The jeweler, after some thought, made the prince a ring containing the inscription “It will pass.” 
 
The inscription, the jeweler felt, was self-explanatory, but he said to the prince for good measure, “The good news is that bad things go away.  The bad news is that good things also go away.” 
 
The jeweler might also have noted that there was nothing in this world that, after a while, did not go away.  Indeed, the prince himself was going away, as it were; the person he was when he went to bed the previous night was not the same person that awoke the next morning.  He was eight hours older.

Time itself was ceaselessly going away, he could have added, too, to the extent that the very idea of time was useless.  When exactly was time?  When was “now?”  There was more past and future than there was “now,” even though the past no longer existed and the future had yet to exist.

“It will pass,” sufficed, he decided.