I believe life is full.
I believe life is full of beginnings – beginnings of careers,
relationships, discoveries…
I keep learning. I keep learning about life, others and myself. And as I keep learning, the primary thing I am learning is how little I know about life, others and myself. Especially myself.
Life is full of seasons -changes, choices, opportunities and unexpected detours, these may all takes us where we were thought we were supposed to go in our lives – though sometimes we may find ourselves deeply where we think we don’t belong. Yet, we may learn something very important there; as the philosopher and author of Hitch-hiker’s guide to the universe, Douglas Adams sums it up – ” I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be”.
Life is full of other people.
Some are reflections of ourselves. Some are windows into the unknown – perhaps even the unknowable.
Life is full of pain, catastrophes and disappointment.
Sometimes we are hurt more than we believe we can bear – and some hurts never seem to let us go. Most of us are highly skilled at creating our own trouble – but there seems to be a lot of trouble floating around in the atmosphere which seems almost magnetically attracted to some of us. As Job 5:7 puts it “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward”.
Life is full of days.
Like waves crashing on a beach, each day rolls in somewhat like the day before, but always fully itself.
Life is full of moments.
We have this continually unrolling stream of immediacy in which we move and act and bump into others.
Life is full of stuff.
Life is full of things that demand our attention; it seems that everything around me needs to be painted, petted, charged or changed, fixed or somehow maintained. A crucial mental survival technique of our era is to somehow rescue, juggle or die a slow and cruel death in the valiant attempt to manage, prioritize or placate constant and usually conflicting demands. Whether for attention, attendance or an oil change – everything around me seems to need my attention. It is nice to be needed, but my things just don’t appreciate me.
We spend our lives collecting stuff – or maybe it collects around us, like barnacles on a boat that sits still too long. And then we die and leave it all behind – and it sticks to somebody else.
Life is full of endings.
Things break or get lost. Friends move. Our children build their own full lives. Pets and parents die. We bury the past – in graves, photo albums or filing cabinets.
Even death itself is an ending – or perhaps a new beginning.
Life is full of beginnings, you know…