"I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking
I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me."
--Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

There is such a nice dichotomy in this song, one that captures something about growing up in America today.  Or maybe it's even something universal about growing up.  Life is not a virtuoso performance by me.  It's a work I share in, a process of which I am one ingredient, a community of which I am a member.  We learn to make a difference by belonging to something that matters, something larger than ourselves.  

I do slightly disagree with the song.  We don't give up our snowflake-dreams to become cogs--or if we have, we have accidentally sold part of our souls.  If anything, to strain these metaphors, we find our unique crystalline snowflake shapes fit together like cogs--and it's probably true that we're not eternally fixed identities, either, needing sometimes to find new places in the world.  But: the emotion of the song is just right.  It's an empowering thing to stop worrying about how I fit in the world and just start serving something.  I think that word choice in the lyrics, "serving," is not an accident.

I see this everywhere in the secular world these days.  People sign up to make their contribution to the world not by hoping to become a famous star adopting scores of international children, but instead people join many small NGOs, for-profit companies, and even governmental agencies with dull names because they believe that they can make a difference.  In my tiny sphere of awareness, I'm watching with some interest the Games for Change Conference, where the brightest video game designers are talking about the ways that games have, can, and may in the future bring about positive change.  I'm sure that sounds wacky to some--I'll spare you the preaching about video games here.

All of that to say: perhaps the largest question facing us is the same one we have spoken of in faith for a long time.  It is a question of vocation.  How our snowflakes combine to make a difference to something larger than us, and how serving makes us more than we are.

Tempus Fugit

I remember being in an advanced Latin class in high school close to the summer, when all real work has gone out the window.  We were talking through an "enrichment" activity where we looked over a variety of well-known Latin phrases and offered their easy translations.  Caveat emptor, e pluribus unum, etc.  And finally, tempus fugit came up.  Normally, we translate that little phrase as 'time flies.'  But, as I had become aware in my laborious work in that class on The Aeneid, 'fugit' really means something like 'runs away', or 'flees', as when an army has lost and is routing.  It wasn't until that moment that I understood that time does not fly--like when we had fun--but that time actually runs away from us, with our hopeless attempts to catch up to it.

All of that to say: I'm overdo to post on this blog, but life has been fleeing.  While I likely won't catch it, perhaps some more posts will appear in the coming months.

I do often wonder about our conception of time.  Is it something that runs away from us?  Does it progress rapidly while we have fun, escaping our notice?  Does it actually always move at the same speed, as our physical processes seem to insist, or does it sometimes pool and eddy, stuck in a stagnant pond?  Is time a schedule to be filled?  Does it demand things from us?  Is time our master?  And of course, what I really want to know: in what way can we see time as a gift?  And maybe even more: how could we treat time like a gift when the world around us sees time as a monster, a mechanism, an opponent?  Can we treat time as a gift without fleeing to the hills?  I wonder.