When we arrive on earth, we are provided with no map for our life journey. Only gradually, as our identity forms and we get an inkling of who we are, do possibilities emerge that call us.*
John O’Donohue

To be a good human is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond dour own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed.**
Martha Nussbaum

Whilst no one possesses a completely blank piece of paper
on which to write their story,
It is increasingly possible to select the environments
we wish to expose ourselves to;
These may be best delineated as certain and uncertain,
The former leading to a closedness, the latter to an openness,
One leading to a smaller world, the other to a very large world of worlds,
One excluding others, the other increasingly including the other.

I will not live an unloved life,
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise …^

*John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us (Dan McAdams – The Stories We Live By – writes similarly: Existential philosophers say that each of us is “thrown” into the world at birth at a particular point in time and space, with certain inborn capabilities and limitations, and our personal challenge is to make something meaningful out of our lives;
**Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote;
^Dawna Markova, from the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer Day 18.