Have you ever thought of what it would be like had you been born into a different family? Actually I know people who feel that the family they now have is definitely not the family they want, but somewhere out there is the right family for them. And had they had an opportunity to be in that family with a different mother, another father, a perfect sibling their life would have been wonderful. Certainly much more so than now. But is that true? We see people who are born into families that from all indications look as though they’re the right families for anybody to have been born into. They appear to have “it all.” But wait – look more closely.
Yes, look more closely at everything. Maybe we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be in this lifetime. From all indications, it seems that we’re here to work things out in our life, and the family we find ourselves with is the right family in this particular lifetime. The challenges, the pains, the sufferings are part of life here, and it’s doubtful whether we humans would accomplish anything without them. There’s no escaping them-no matter the family we’re part of-because those challenges, those pains, those sufferings are what we need for our greater growth. And ultimately will make life sweeter, richer, happier, and give us a better understanding of ourselves and our world-if we allow it.
And if we believe in a higher power, and the evolution of a soul, and the orderliness underneath the chaos, then it makes sense to believe that we’re right where we’re supposed to be. That if we would accept where we are, and use our energy to make our life a work of art, if we do that, and not focus on what we think we should have had, we’ll soon see the bigger picture. We’re the one who makes that happen for ourselves, no one else can. It would seem that human beings are on a quest. And the quest is to evolve. To appreciate and enjoy what is before us serves our quest beautifully, yearning for what wasn’t and isn’t, wastes our precious energy.
“Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.” -Leo Tolstoy
“You could not discover the frontiers of the soul, even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth of its meaning” -Heraclitus of Ephesus
“To know how to live is my trade and my art.” -Michel De Montaigne
Physicist Roger Penrose has said that the chance of an ordered univese happening at random is 10 to the 10 to the 30th against-a number so large that if you programmed a compjuter to write a million zeros per second, it would take a million times the age of the universe just to write the number down.
“Ultimately, one has to wonder how scientists who assume the profound presence of patterns in nature in order to practice their very art can also assume that those patterns developed randomly, from nothingness. Patterns imply intelligence, and an ordered creation implies an orderer.” – Andy Fletcher, Letter to the Editor, Harper’s (from The Road Within)