Wednesday, May 18, 2005

• I've been thinking of late that the problem with modernity is our obsession with power and control. We are so caught up in our own plans for life that we often forget that life has its own plans for us.

  After all, how will our best laid plans help us when the element of chaos strikes and stops us from their fulfillment? Campbell portrays the present as a moment of free fall into the future. None of us can fully comprehend the great reality that lays before us, and none of our plans can serve as an ultimate reference for our life. The failing grade can end the career of an academic; the car accident can paralyze the athlete; the housefire can shatter the dreams of a devoted parent.

  But what more damage does our ambition do than it does to our friends? For when we are filled with ambitions and visions of future destiny, we see our fellow human beings not as temporal presences but rather as simple unrealized potential. And what worse sin can we commit against our friends than to see them as something as yet unrealized and ignore the real presence that is here with us? What hubris, to think that our plans and not the plans of life shape our relationships!

  But even if we should not, cannot plan, there remains one thing to us as we fall into the future--we needs must dream. For it is in dreams that we see the world as it ought to be. Dreams are the weft of the tapestry yet unwoven, the vision in the weaver's eye. It is through our dreams that we look forward, and it is only through dreaming that we may truly feel the calling of life, and know what purpose life has for us.

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