What We Are; What We May Become – Sunday, October 20, 1985
Recently a little girl played on the swings of a city park. Her parents sat on a bench a short distance away and watched. Each time the swing reached the apex of its backward arc, the girl threw her body back, pulled with her arms at the chains that supported the swing, pumped with her legs, and forced the swing to return forward, higher still.
Finally, one of her backward swings paused at the top of its orbit, the chains nearly parallel to the ground, the girl looked at her parents and gasped, “Look I’m flying!”
Of course, people don’t fly. People build machines that fly; people send rockets farther into space than we can see; people pump swings into breathless moments of suspension between earth and sky. But people do not, of themselves, fly. Or do they?
We are bound by this envelope of flesh we call our bodies. We clothe ourselves and feed ourselves and feel ourselves grow. But there are accomplishments which seem forever to elude us. There are ways in which we are no nearer to flying than when we were children.
Or are we?
There is a contradiction in us. It is this: We are limited, and yet we are limitless. We are physical, and yet we are spiritual. We cannot fly, and yet we dream of flying. Not merely the innocent dreams of children who feel themselves float free from the canvas seats of playground swings, but the hopes and ambitions people have had since the beginning of time. What we are is what we may become.
There is more than a metaphor to be found in a little girl’s swinging. Life, too, has its ups and downs—high points and low. Too often we concentrate on the low point of life’s arc and never realize our full potential. Like the little girl, we learn to cherish and push for those moments when it feels like we’re “flying.” The ecstasy of experience we had as children is nearer the center of our lives than any of the disappointments we have experienced since.
We may not be flying yet, but we were born to fly. Children know this, feel it, see it in their dreams. And the contradiction of adulthood is that too many of us have forgotten what a little girl on a swing knows.
October 20, 1985
Broadcast Number 2,931