About 45 years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Notre Dame, singer/songwriter/musician Dan Fogelberg released his epic, double-length LP song cycle titled “The Innocent Age.” I still remember feeling mesmerized by the opening strains of his acoustic guitar work on “Nexus,” the first song on the first side of the first disc. The lyrics that followed drew me in even more deeply.

Recently, I was listening to “Nexus” yet again. As is so often the case with favorites we return to over and over, I found new layers of meaning emerging, and came to see the chorus as a kind of anthem for life:

Wealthy the spirit

That knows its own flight

Stealthy the hunter

Who slays his own fright

Blessed the traveler

Who journeys the length of the light.

Fogelberg seems to be calling us to three things that serve us well as we move through our days: consciousness, courage, and completion.

“Wealthy the spirit / that knows its own flight” calls us to consciousness. It is Fogelberg’s modern echo of the ancient inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself.” To know your own ‘flight’ is to be aware of the uniqueness of your journey—its particular direction, shape, challenges, and opportunities.

“Stealthy the hunter / who slays his own fright” calls us to courage. There are frightening things we each carry within us, some of which seem to have been with us from the moment we were born. Then there are the frightening things we personally encounter in outer life along the way. Finally, there are, increasingly, frightening things going on in the wider world, things that can feel overwhelmingly big and beyond our control. Part of the work in living lies in finding ways to slay our fears in the face of each of these. I don’t think this means some heroic, solo quest to do it all by ourselves. What if to ‘slay’ one’s fear, one’s ‘fright,’ means simply to summon the courage to face those fears, including the courage to ask for help and support when we need it?

“Blessed the traveler / who journeys the length of the light” calls us to completion. It is one thing to make a start, buoyed by enthusiasm and expectant hope. It is another thing entirely to see the journey through to the end—to persist, even when it’s hard to see “the light”; to keep at it until our destiny is realized, until we’ve learned the lessons we came here to learn, and have made the contributions to life that we alone can make.

Years ago, I sold or gave away about 150 of my old LPs—all except one: I kept the copy of “The Innocent Age” that Dan Fogelberg signed for me after a solo concert he did in Seattle back in February of 1992 at the Paramount Theatre. After the show, I waited for hours in the freezing cold, hopeful. When he finally emerged from the back door, he was gracious, engaging, and funny. After we talked about music for a few minutes, I asked him why so many of his paintings and photographs were of graveyards (in addition to being a musician, he was an accomplished artist). He replied, with a wry smile, “Maybe because eventually I’m going to spend so much time in one.” He died of prostate cancer in 2007, a few months past his 56^th birthday.

None of us know how long “the length of the light” will be for us. We can only hope to cultivate consciousness and courage along the way, and do all we can to reach completion, whatever that may be.

*The day after I finished writing this reflection on how our “big” agendas can be replaced by ones that are smaller, gentler, and more subtle, and that feel even more meaningful, former Washington Post Books editor Ron Charles published this story in his Substack post: “Wednesday night in Washington, Mahreen Sohail accepted the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Small Scale Sinners, a story collection about women in Pakistan. Sohail noted that she’d worked on a novel for more than six years but couldn’t find a publisher. In desperation, she turned to the stories she’d been writing on the side simply as a creative release. ‘I’d written a whole other book,’ she said. ‘Art can be surprising. It is one of the many joys of making it, how it can reveal yourself to you.’”