AHSS The Gift of Years: Dreams (Lesson 23)

“In a dream you are never eighty,” Anne Sexton wrote. Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological; the spirit is eternal. The number of our years does not define us. Deep down where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again. It is our own fault if we refuse to think again all the great ideas of life – and our own position on each of them.

The personality and the soul within an aging body stays always alert, ever dynamic. Even when we find ourselves less physically active than we may once have been, the mind wrestles with the ideas of the soul, the heart reviews over and over again every emotional moment of life, every major turn along the way. We are forever in motion, as long as we live, one way or another. To stay alive, fully alive, then, we must open ourselves to life’s eternal dream.

We must dream to be better people tomorrow than we were today. We must be willing to rethink all the ideas that have kept us bound until this moment. Are they still believable? Do we ourselves still believe them? And if we do not, what does that mean in regard to what we say to those younger people who have been influenced by these ideas because of us?

One of the problems of the modern world is that we are more fascinated with technology than we are with the spiritual. We are good at reporting every technical or scientific advance the world has ever spawned but other elements of life, more profound and impacting on human society, are inclined to be missed entirely. One of them has special meaning to the aging. One of them shows us that the dreams that determine the ultimate quality of our lives never die, are never too late to be grasped. It is the ability of humans to change their minds, to begin again, to start over, to be someone else.

Robert McNamara, past Secretary of Defense, one of the chief architects of our part in the Vietnam war, and consultant for the documentary The Fog of War, told the public that he had thought it over and could no longer support the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Nor could he condone his own part in it. He had reflected again on what he had done in the past, why he had done it what he thought about it then and now and came to a startling conclusion: “Although we sought to do the right thing – and believed we were doing the right thing – in my judgement, hindsight proves us wrong.” This change of perspective took place twenty-five years after the end of the war.

The very act of reviewing one’s own values, then and now, stands as a marker for us all. It reminds us that it is possible to learn as we go through life. It is even more important to be open to doing it and willing to report it. Life grows us. Life opens us as we age to think differently, even about ourselves. Whatever our physical age, we must go on dreaming of the desirable so that we can do our bit to make it happen. We must allow ourselves to dream about what life could really be like if enough of us demanded that it were. But to do that means to open for examination all the assumptions that have driven the world to this point. All of them. In our dreams lies the unfinished work for the world.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is that we come to think that our dreaming days are over. Then we become mired in the past. We refuse to grow. We make past mistakes the definition of our entire life. A blessing of these years is the power to dream and the freedom it takes to bring to the awareness of our world – however small, however boundaried it may be – the voice of reflection, of reason of feeling, of penetrating awareness that comes with having been wrong and setting our to right it.

1. Sister Joan suggests that “In our dreams, in the way we ourselves see ourselves, we are forever becoming.” Share in your journal or through discussion, one or more ways you can say that you are still “forever becoming.”