The Eyes Of A Child

Yesterday was a very quiet day and I was happy for that. I had to work which is something that I don’t like to do on September 11, but I had no choice because I had been scheduled for a training that I had to be at as a requirement for my job. I was a bit surprised that it was barely mentioned at all during the day – one woman at the training did mention it because she was coming from outside of the city like I was and she’d left extra early just in case there was heavy traffic or delays on the bridge she had to go over, but other than that, no one mentioned it at all. I suppose if an event had no impact on your life, even if it impacted thousands of other people around you, maybe somehow the day just becomes like any other day. I know for me, just taking the train into the city was a bit unnerving, and I could sense a quietness on the train and a relief when we got through the tunnel and into the city. The city itself was quieter than usual and the trains much less crowded during the morning rush hour, and going home again it was the same.

It is a strange thing to reflect on a day when so many lives were lost and so many people who survived lost so much. There is a feeling of gratefulness for being alive and for not having lost anyone who was near to me in any way. But there is a feeling of the sadness for all of those lives lost, a grief that is collective for everyone who is grieving. We are not promised tomorrow, and a time like this is a reminder that every day and every moment of life is a gift.

There are so many dreams and visions that the Lord has put on my heart, and I can be so impatient with waiting for them to come true that I forget to enjoy the moments that I have because I am waiting for the moments that I want to come. I have always had that kind of impatience, even before I was born again when the dreams were much smaller and the visions much simpler. I remember one summer before I was moving to New York, when I had the opportunity to be a counselor at what had been my favorite summer camp for chamber music, which meant that I had a scholarship to go for free. After that I was teaching at a private summer school, making some much needed money so that I could make the move. The summer camp was in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, one of the best vacation spots in the North East, and as a counselor I’d have much more freedom and opportunity than I ever had as a younger camper – and it would cost me nothing to be there, in a place where I loved to be, doing something I loved to do. The private school was a very wealthy one, and I was teaching language and literature, two of my favorite subjects, and I was an associate teacher so the job was not hard at all. We had all kinds of lavish faculty parties and special events with shrimp cocktail and other delicious food all the time. Both opportunities were gifts, but I couldn’t wait to go to New York, and I felt restless and impatient and dissatisfied the entire time. Now that I have dealt with some real problems in my life, I wonder how I would respond to those places were I to go back there again in time.

I suppose it’s unfair to expect the self that we used to be to have the understanding of the person we are now. A lot of water has gone under that bridge that I have walked on. There’s a Bob Dylan song, “My Back Pages,” that has a line, “Ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” When I just looked it up, I found a blog post called Barry’s Blog, http://blog.westaf.org/2011/07/ah-but-i-was-so-much-older-then-im.html, that was written by a former Director of the California Arts Council. He uses the song in a section titled, “The Cycles of Life and the Arts in Keeping Us Young,” and writes, “Bob Dylan wrote of the phenomenon of how points at certain of the times of our lives affect how we see things. In one of my favorite of his poems (songs – but I always thought of him as the Poet Laureate of my generation) – “My Back Pages” – Dylan lamented the conceit that in the fiery brand period of our college age youth, we knew it all. The great moral questions of life were black and white to us at that juncture of our lives – and we knew, just knew, what was right, what was wrong – about virtually everything in the world.” He continues in another paragraph, “At some point early on you lose the childhood innocence and wonder and confusion – the magical place where being sure of something isn’t all that important – and you become dogmatic and intractable, and even smug in your outlook. The arrogance of youth knows no generational exclusivity – it rears its head every generation. It may simply be a part of growing up.”

As I read Barry’s blog post, I think about Jesus telling us in Mark 10:15, “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” It is that same wide eyed innocence and wonder and even the confusion, that same magical place that Barry is writing about where we have no arrogance, where we just take the information in and accept it as we receive it with no judgment. When we can have that innocence and wide eyed wonder, we will not be looking into the future for what it is that we want that lies ahead, we will instead be looking at the wonder and magic of the world around us and enjoying each moment as the gift that it is.

I have written before that since I was born again people have told me that I look younger all the time. When I was growing up, I always looked much older than my age. It seems that maybe I am getting to that place where I can say along with Dylan, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” I pray with all my heart this is true as I want to live my life with the kind of wonder and innocence that can wake up each morning and know that it’s a new day where miracles can happen, and that can be happy just because I'm alive.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan