By Mark Azzara
Dear Friend,
Every year my daughter sends me a calendar that contains dozens of photographs of her children, my grandchildren. Every year I pin the new calendar on the wall right above my computer.
At the moment I’m looking up at my oldest granddaughter as she leaps through the air in what I presume is a dance class rehearsal. In that photo montage she also is shown curled up on a blanket and smiling, beaming with a bow in her hair, going nose to shell with one of her hermit crabs, and taking a mirror-image selfie with her prized camera.
Someone (possibly George Bernard Shaw, but no one is sure) once said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” Until I saw this calendar page I might have agreed, but those photographs remind me who I am – and can still be.
Those photographs talk to me about dreams – sky-high dreams, no-limit dreams, dreams of fascination and curiosity. Dreams that may well lead to a well-lived life of contentment.
Teenagerhood isn’t just a time for dreams, of course. Teens are “adolescents,” a word that means young adults. They are experimenting and trying new things, all in the quest to understand their uniqueness and what it means to be a unique adult.
A quotation from John Barrymore that also looms over my computer defines adulthood in a way I appreciate: “A man is not old until regrets start taking the place of dreams.”
Unfortunately, some kids – many of whom are “adults” in a chronological sense – already think they know what it means to be an adult. They think that power is what makes someone an adult. Or money. Or fame. And they already are resolved to stop at nothing to achieve those goals – or, if that fails, to cynically stop others from achieving their goals. But they don’t have a clue.
An adult is someone who loves, who is inquisitive and self-assured but not egotistical, who believes in her abilities and is unafraid to test her limits, who cares about others as much as herself.
Of course, this is not an all-encompassing definition of an adult. Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments section at the end of this column or on our Facebook page.
Will my granddaughter become a dancer some day? A photographer? A biologist? Who knows? This is what she is trying to discover.
There is a lesson in all of this for the rest of us. In Joel 3:1, quoted in Acts 2, it says that “Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions.” This is meant to encourage us, despite our age, to continue to dream and to test our limits in the pursuit of those dreams – holy dreams, dreams inspired by God, dreams that motivate us to try new things and test our limits, all in the quest to be more loving, self-assured, capable, unafraid, unique adults.
This is the freedom we have from God – the freedom to be fully human. The tragedy is that we waste so much of that freedom, so much of our lives, focusing on stuff that’s meaningless – stuff like power, money and fame.
All God’s blessings – Mark
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