tymeful

At the due time.

I like the Middle English word tymeful meaning ‘at the due time.’

In contrast with timelessness, it reflects the beauty of transience. It captures a quality of being within a moment, bound to it. We are only alive in time, truly timeless things are, necessarily, dead.

Why the Middle English spelling, why not timeful? Because rooting it in the spelling of a bygone era draws more attention to the beauty of this idea that everything that is alive or ever was alive, was alive at the due time.

Words, like ideas, are kept alive in our minds, in our memories. They live not just through transformation, they live by transformation.

Put another way, tymeful transmits a lightly different idea for me than timeful, and I like the feeling of that earlier form.