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.
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.
