My mother went to an all-girls Catholic school in Des Moines. It was called St. Joseph’s. How St. Joseph made his way into an all-girls Catholic school, I don’t know. I’m sure area boys were jealous of him.   It is unlikely any of them were saints.

She once told me that when she was young a nun had asked them if any of them knew why time went faster as we got older. No one offered any guesses. My bet is that they weren’t old enough to notice yet. It was no matter, their teacher had, and they were going to have to hear about it anyway. This is the process we refer to as education.

“Time goes faster as we get older, because every year a single year becomes less and less significant. When you are five a year represents 20% of your life, but when you are 40 it is but a fraction of it.” The nun was obviously 70 and depressed. She kept a calendar on the wall, not for the dates on it, but rather for the breeze generated as they passed by.

It could have been worse, of course. St. Joseph was well beyond 70 and approaching 2000. Ordinarily he would have been pleased to have had a girls school named after him, but he sneezed and missed it entirely. By the time God said, “I bless you,” it had merged with the boys at Dowling.

My mother related this story to me when I was young, and it sat unchallenged in some recess of my mind for many years. That is until one day when I heard a man describe his 40 year marriage as having only been like five minutes. After a brief pause he simply added, “under water.” It seems he and the nun had a different perspective. Hers had been heavenly, the husband’s something lower. It would appear for him that life was taking forever. Perhaps it was the Devil’s sister he was married to. Either that or he was simply a wise ass, and life was taking forever for her.

It wouldn’t surprise me if he had met her when he was 12, and she was attending an all-girls Catholic school. Perhaps the real lesson of life is to be found there, for it’s the only thing that suggests how we ought to be spending our time, regardless of how fast it moves. We should spend it in pursuit of the dreams we have.

Yes, it’s true: our dreams will never go how we thought they would. They are always going to cost more, pay less, take longer, last shorter than we ever imagined. To pursue a dream is to kill it in a way. But it’s only in pursuing it, it’s only in this killing, that our dreams ever truly live.

Some might think it macabre, this talk of killing a dream, but think of life, think of us, think of those times that we made all the right pursuits only to be left disillusioned when the dream was more expensive, or yielded less, or took longer, or lasted shorter than we thought it should. We took every step except the one that mattered most: letting it be what it is. Instead the dream was traded for the fantasy of what it was supposed to be but wasn’t.

If you are a 12 year old boy, there’s hardly a better dream to have than a cute brunette at an all-girls Catholic school. In fact I would suggest a cute brunette is a damn good dream any old time. It is worth pursuing, and it is worth letting it be what it is.

We tell our kids they should dream, as though that will make them creative, but the fact is it won’t. They could dream the same dream their whole lives, but in order to create something, in order to give it life, they will eventually have to pursue it. Even if in its pursuit life seemingly takes forever, chances are they will love every minute of it. She might too.