I had a moment several nights ago.
It was in my dreams. And it was extraordinarily vivid.
Janet and I were there, roller skating, joined on some type of large sidewalk that almost looked like an enclosed ice skating rink as the people we knew and have interacted with pretty much during our entire adult lives were fluidly weaving on and around the sidewalk.
We weren’t always headed in the same direction — at least not completely — but we all seemed to be intertwined with each other as we criss-crossed and traversed each other’s paths.
There were the adult parents, then the kids; sometimes they were smiling and sometimes not.
Sometimes partners stayed the same, but other times the partners changed.
Regardless, they were there . . . many of them . . . as we seemed to intermittently skate not so much with each other as much as it was through each other’s paths.
Not everybody was there, but a lot of them were: particularly ones who played more than just a passing role in the lives of our family members.
I had a conversation with one of the fellow skaters.
We were skating together for that particular stretch as we looked on the group weaving about. He was one of the ones who had not so much changed partners as he did simply acquire separate partners, sharing the common reality of his kids.
We looked over what we saw and, despite the messiness and drama that life often dishes up, it came to us as we shared our thoughts in that dream, that our lives are certainly defined by our own personal actions, mistakes, misjudgments, and choices, but almost as much by how our days are actually played out with the lives we share and the people we share them with.
It reminded me of a series of books I had read a very long time ago.
It was called, “A Dance to the Music of Time.” The books written by Anthony Powell trace the observations of the narrator, Nick Jenkins, as he puts on paper his reflections on his interactions with his contemporaries in the early 1900′s.
When I woke up and remembered the dream, it brought to mind a particular passage in that book that I want to share with you here.
I didn’t remember it verbatim, of course, but I went back to the book to find it.
It was buried in the first few pages of ”A Question of Upbringing,” written in 1951, as Nick is reflecting out loud while snow descends on a coal fired garbage can warming the homeless hands rubbing their palms against the back drop of Nick’s thoughts.
Here it is:
“These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The muse of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of humajn beings, facing outward like the Seasons moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evaluations that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seeemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.”
I find myself these days not necessarily looking towards the next twenty years, although I intend to grace them as God ordains, but often looking back over the past twenty.
And I recognize in doing so that as much as I did not necessarily intentionally cultivate any particular relationship that had been formed, the scenes I remember — aside from those with my family — are those I experienced with the people who enveloped the life I’ve lived.
And as I reconnect to the night that dream overtook me, below the floating leaves flitting aimlessly, perhaps purposely, through each other’s gentle free-fall, I realize that it’s possible that the joy we capture in the moment is the serenity we share, dancing . . . sometimes rhythmically and often times not . . . to the compassionate, yet perplexing, music of time.