Time & Perspective Quote by John W. Foster

Against the soldierly temptation to treat time as something to be killed, Foster reframes it as something to be inhabited. "The here-and-now" is usually the phrase of pragmatists and drill sergeants: focus, execute, survive. Foster keeps the discipline but swaps the payoff. The present isn’t a waiting room between meaningful events; it’s the only place where meaning can actually be practiced. Calling the present "no mere filling of time" rejects the default modern habit (and the older martial one) of endurance-as-virtue: you get through the day, you grind, you count down. His correction is pointedly theological: time is filled "with God", not with distractions, not with stoic grit, not even with patriotic purpose.

The rhetoric works because it converts an abstract piety into a concrete demand. "Filling" is tactile and domestic; it turns spirituality into an active verb, like packing a canteen before a march. It implies agency: the here-and-now can be emptied out by boredom, fear, or routine, or it can be stocked with presence, prayer, and attention. Foster’s subtext is moral triage. If you can sanctify the minute in front of you, you can endure uncertainty without letting it harden you.

Context matters: a 19th-century soldier lived amid long stretches of waiting punctuated by catastrophe. Foster’s line reads like a countermeasure to the spiritual anesthetic of camp life and the existential numbness of war. It’s less sentiment than strategy: holiness as a way to keep the present from becoming dead time.