The Time of Not-Knowing

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I dreamed when I was a boy of someday traveling in space to other planets. It was the dawning of the space age, and my dream seemed quite within reach. 

During the past few weeks, my yearnings to have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” were rekindled when I attended with my daughter the New York Philharmonic’s Star Wars concert, and then reading about the Euclid telescope’s astounding images of the Milky Way, marking a new age of discovery of thousands of planets outside our solar system.

Goosebumps just writing that last sentence!

But with my maturity comes this enlightenment: Life’s greatest wisdom is to know when the party’s over. 

Even if I had the financial wherewithal of a Musk or a Bezos, I am not going into space in my lifetime.

Near the end of John's gospel, right after Peter has been forgiven for betraying Christ “three times before the cock crows,” Jesus tells him what old age looks like: “When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not wish to go.“ 

In Scripture, as in most spiritual writings, our purpose as humans is defined not so much about what we do – our output – as it is about our simple being – who we are. 

Paul writes to the Corinthians that prophecy will cease, tongues will be silenced, knowledge will pass away – and love alone will remain. He's describing what's left when everything a person can “do” has been stripped away. 

For a hospice patient, that's not an abstraction. It's their situation – described exactly. 

If our “life’s purpose” can be narrowed to being loved and loving in return – no  longer producing, deciding, achieving – then the last years of a life are not a diminution of its meaning. They just might be its clearest mission statement.

In my retirement from revenue-generating work, I find myself trying to unlearn my long-held conviction that a person's worth is bound up in “doing.” 

My present life isn’t being interrupted. It’s quietly being prepared for that stillness “not chosen” that Christ described. For the time of not-knowing. When “purpose” might be nothing more important than a held hand.

Still, I can continue to dream of someday touching a star, can’t I?

(Image: The Euclid telescope‘s look at the Galactic Bulge in the central area of the Milky Way. The Bulge is a vast, tightly packed structure filled mostly with old, cooler stars.)