Continuing on our musical theme, I have brought to mind another song that touches me. Today’s song is “dream on” by Aerosmith. The lyrics begin…
Every time when I look in the mirror … All these lines on my face getting clearer … The past is gone … It went by, like dusk to dawn …. Isn’t that the way … Everybody’s got the dues in life to pay
As I edge closer to 70, the words in the first verse become a painfully and unambiguously honest reflection of my reflection. And like most of you who have 5, 6, or 7+ decades under your belt, the past has absolutely gone by like it was just one day … a single dusk to dawn. And while rich in memories, it was a day disturbingly rapid in its passage.
The chorus continues …. I know nobody knows … Where it comes and where it goes … I know it’s everybody sin …. You got to lose to know how to win.
Profound for me was the insight that we “have to lose to know how to win.” (Joni Mitchell touches on this same theme in her song Big Yellow Taxi when she sang “we don’t know what we’ve got ’til it’s gone.” )
How absolutely germane those words are to our experiences during this pandemic. It seems that we have lost so very much due to this virus, and yet it is in losing the things we thought were important to us, that we discover the things that are truly important to us.
This is not the first, or the only, experience with this paradox however. From the first friend who moved away when we were a child, to our first love as a young teen … we discovered how we are changed by events. Our first experience of the death of a friend, our loss of a grandparent, our loss of a parent, our loss of a child. All of these events in our life become foundational in shaping how we see life, family, friendship and relationships beyond the event. Having lost, we understand something more of the richness of meanings in the moments of our lives.
This seeming dichotomy is a message we are told over and over again in scripture, and which is summarized so eloquently in the Prayer of Saint Francis ….. It is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to eternal life.
St. Francis’s reflection on living out the Gospel is a powerful reminder that the fruits of our sufferings – the transformation of our awareness of love and God’s love – are received precisely through the sufferings we experience.
So, when at times during this pandemic I am tempted to have a bit of a ‘pity party’ – feel sorry for myself and my inability to do the things I used to do – I remind myself that the transformation in perspective that comes from this suffering is its greatest gift to me.