In his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.

So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else.

And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

~Joseph Campbell

how many times will I look up to know?

inquiry for today~ may you feel as if the dance will never end….

neverland

In those moments-

Sometimes, after she falls and before she gets up,

she takes a deep breath. And in those moments,

she stares briefly into the Center of Things. It calms her.

For in those moments, she drinks from something older than her life.

Other times, the same thing happens when reading a passage from

a book that opens her heart. Or when hearing that lift in a song that

makes her think of looking at the stars asa little girl.

She never knows how to speak of these openings.

It’s as if the still point of her life rests on the bottom of all trouble like

a weighted pearl. And an invisible string ties it to her heart.

And every once in a while, the pearl of life tugs at her heart,

forcing her to fall and remember that there is nowhere to go.

~Mark Nepo