A Sad and Dangerous Little Game

"There is a sad and dangerous little game we play when we get to be a certain age. It is a form of solitaire. We get out our class yearbook, look at the pictures of the classmates we knew best, and recall the days when we first knew them in school, all those years ago. We think about all the exciting, crazy, wonderfully characteristic things they used to be interested in and about the kind of dreams we had about what were going to do when we graduated and about the kind of dreams that maybe we had for some of them. Then we think about what those classmates actually did with their lives, what we are doing with them now ten or twenty years later. I make no claim that the game is always sad or that when it seems to be sad our judgment is always right, but once or twice when I have played it myself, sadness has been a large part of what I have felt. Because in my class, at the school I went to, as in any class at any school, there were students who had a real flair, a real talent, for something. Maybe it was for writing or acting or sports. Maybe it was an interest and joy in working with people toward some common goal, a sense of responsablity for people who in some way had less than they had or were less. Sometimes it was just their capacity for being so alive that made you more alive to be with them. Yet now, a good many years later, I have the feeling that more than just a few of them are spending their lives at work in which none of these gifts is being used, at work they seem to be working at with neither much pleasure nor any sense of accomplishment. This is the sadness of the game, and the danger of it is that maybe we find that in some measure we are among them or that we are too blind to see that we are."

- Fredrick Buechner from Secrets in the Dark