There is a moment most people have, usually around a dinner table, when they look at the people they love and feel the future leaning in. The future where some of these people will not be at the table. The future where you will not be at the table. The dinner is fine. The food is fine. Nothing is wrong. But the moment is suddenly very large and very old, because something in you knows what is coming.
You know it about your kids. You know it about your parents. You know it about the friend a mile away who laughs the way she did when you were both seventeen. You know it about your own body, which used to do things it cannot do anymore. Then somebody asks for the salt, and the conversation resumes, and you resume with it, and no one at the table knows you were briefly somewhere else.
The visits leave a residue. You find yourself watching your people with a tenderness slightly out of proportion to the evening, laughing at the joke and storing the laugh at the same time. Some people get the visits rarely. Some get them weekly. The feeling has been trying to tell you something your whole life, and it is not mainly a warning. It is information about what you are.
He has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
The verse makes two claims that sit together uncomfortably. The first is that something in you is sized for eternity. There is a hunger in you that ordinary things will not fill, even the very good ordinary things, and you know this the way you know things without being told. The second claim is that you cannot get there. The whole picture is not yours to hold. You can see what is in front of you, and sometimes backward, and never forward, never God's part in any of it from beginning to end. The hunger is real, and it was put there on purpose.
The person most surprised by this is often the one who did everything right. He has done what the plan said. The house is the house they wanted. The career survived every downturn. The kids came out kind. On paper there is nothing left to want, and that is precisely the problem, because the wanting has not stopped. He stands at the kitchen window some evenings with a feeling he would be embarrassed to name, a homesickness with no house attached to it. He checked every box, and the ache is still there. Nothing went wrong. He is finding out, at fifty, that he was built for something the boxes were never going to hold.
You can do one of three things with the verse. You can deny the first half: the hunger is a glitch, nothing means anything, stop pretending. This is honest as far as it goes, and it does not match what happens to most people at a table on a Tuesday. You can deny the second half: you have it figured out, the system is solved, eternity fits in a box you can carry. This is the religious version of the same move, and the box was never going to hold it. Or you can let the verse stand and live inside the tension. The hunger stays. The limit stays. You do not get to resolve them. You get to live with both, and the living is the good part.
Nobody chooses once. The first denial is available every time the feed is more bearable than the feeling. The second is available every time an answer would be more comfortable than a mystery. The third position has to be retaken every day, the way a person standing on a boat keeps his feet. That is not a flaw in the wisdom. It is what wisdom is like to hold. Ecclesiastes was not written from a settled chair. It reads like a man pacing, which is part of why it can be trusted.
Five times in his book the Preacher stops describing and tells you what to do. Eat your bread. Drink your wine. Do good while you live. Rejoice in the work you were given. The instruction is to receive: there is something in front of you today, between the longing and the limit, and it is in your hands. Passivity takes whatever drifts by. Receiving pays attention, the difference between hearing noise from another room and listening to a person across a table.
So the next time the future leans in, you do not have to look away, and you do not have to solve it. Nobody can be commanded into a feeling. Anyone can be commanded to turn toward a table and sit down. Pass the salt, and look at who is there.