While we draw breath, we want to make the most of life.  Yes?

If only we could wish it and it would happen, but life isn’t like that.

What begins in curiosity, continues in inquiry, grows into fascination, sweats hard graft through trying and failing and learning, until the magic happens, and what was imagined becomes real and beautiful and helpful.

This isn’t a blueprint with “do this, then this, then this” instructions.  There’re as many ways to walk this way as there are people.  The weird thing is how we often we closely copy others, or fall into living a cliché, or put off what we really want to do until tomorrow.

We can struggle the tendency of life to take us into the unknown and unfamiliar, even though we’re fully capable of negotiating the liminal.

For a start, we’re all equipped with faith, a future-sensing ability which isn’t only the requisite of the religious.  A closer look at faith shows it’s exactly what we express when we open our minds and hearts and wills, each requires we open ourselves to what we don’t know, haven’t felt, or have not done before.

The Human story is replete with tales of how people have done just this, this journey being told again and again in the legends and myths personifying the human spirit, including contemporary film narratives and tales of superheroes – often tales of becoming.

I’ve enjoyed sharing snippets from the stories about time told by Alan Lightman.  The latest story I’ve read reflects on the texture of time – smooth, rough, prickly, silky, hard, soft – and then tells a story about a world in which the texture of time is sticky:

‘Portions of towns become stuck in some moment in history and do not get out.  So, too, individual people become stuck is some point of their lives and do not get free.’*

Sticky time is disconnecting, holding us in the past, disconnecting us from our future self, from one another, from the world in which we live:

‘For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.  Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.’*

Even to notice what we notice is a beginning to getting unstuck, prising open my knowing to see and understand more:

‘Such an opening or reopening is entirely necessary to help you make fresh starts to break through to new levels.  You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing and confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.’**

There’s something more coming to us in the unknown – wonder.  The unknown in this way is our friend:

‘The unknown evokes wonder.  If you lose your sense of wonder, you lose the sacramental majesty of the world.  Nature is no longer a presence, it is a thing,  Your life becomes a dead cage of facts.’^

We each have the possibility of reopening present and future time, something which isn’t singular, our of scarcity – but a plethora possibilities, out of abundance

(*From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)