Time & Perspective Quote by Kate Seredy

There is a quiet defiance in Seredy's line: the refusal to pretend we can choreograph life with perfect knowledge. "For yesterday and for all tomorrows" yokes regret and anticipation into the same sentence, then answers both with a verb that is bodily, communal, and stubbornly present. Dance here isn't escapism; it's a discipline of continuing. The phrase "the best we know" undercuts any heroic narrative. It doesn't promise transcendence, only effort - imperfect, human-scale, and therefore believable.

Seredy, a writer shaped by early-20th-century Europe and the dislocations that followed, understood that history doesn't politely pause while people gather themselves. The context matters: for someone who lived through war years and mass upheaval, the past isn't a lesson you neatly apply, and the future isn't a plan you can trust. You move anyway. The subtext is survival without grandstanding. It's an ethic that feels especially modern in an age of performance culture: we are constantly told to optimize, to have a "five-year plan", to present a polished self. Seredy offers an alternative metric - not mastery, but sincerity.

The line also smuggles in tenderness. "We" is doing real work, implying shared motion rather than solitary grit. Dancing becomes a social contract: even when yesterday bruises and tomorrow threatens, we keep time together as best we can. That modest promise is why the sentence lands; it gives dignity to muddling through without romanticizing the mess.