Growing up is a creeping thing. It doesn’t happen all at once—it
comes instead in small, hesitant steps urged on by inexperience,
grabbed up greedily, desired and hoarded until it crams itself into
every available empty corner, filling places with responsibility
where dreams once wandered.
Age easily takes up
sovereignty once it’s admitted. Experience, confidence, knowledge,
accomplishment, systematic management of hours and years—they take
over, stable and ascendant. Age builds a fortress, a throne room,
from which life is managed, data sorted, plans made and executed. We
yield this ground more than willingly, expecting it to open a way for
achievement, for explosion from bud to blossom.
But this ordering,
this considered management also exacts a price. It imposes the
tyranny of the useful. From these heights, play becomes wasted time,
spontaneity is assigned to fools, and dreaming disintegrates and
floats away, shouldered out by schedules and appointments.
This is when
childhood becomes clearer and I, with both hands up, cling to the
bars of my handcrafted prison. I peer out between them, whose names I
now know to be Misunderstood Serving and Unnecessary Sacrifice, into
an almost untouched world of effortless surprise.
The pendulum has
swung too far, and I have pushed it into motion with my own two
hands. But I can push it back again. Childlike joy, after all, has
not vanished. It’s only hiding and to find it requires no effort at
all.
Life is not a job,
living not an assignment that will be graded according to its
results. Even as I am given work to do, gifts to use, a talent to
invest, so does God give me Time—long, open expanses of clear air
and the freedom to fill them or to simply walk into them, feeling the
brush of tall reeds through my fingers or the sun on my hair.
I’ve lost too much
time already, I think. The towering, perfectly round maple in my west
field has made and lost twenty undocumented crowns of leaves. I don’t
know which birds nest in the old henhouse. My children have gotten
old enough to produce their own new humans. The sun has risen and set
too often unremarked.
There is a point
where planning becomes superfluous. Opening eyes and unclenching
fists is the easiest thing in the world to do. Perhaps it would have
been better to have seen this earlier, but this bit of horizon is
now, at least, coming into better focus. Now, like an infant, all I
need to do is look out and reach.
