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
when the days become longer and more lean
inquiry for today~ ok. maybe it’s your destiny?
As the waves of the ocean rise and fall, often with terrifying impact, the depths of the ocean remain still and unmoving. If we wish to escape from the turbulence on the surface of the ocean any attempt to stop the waves and calm the sea is utterly impractical. The deepest ocean remains undisturbed, That is the place of peace, that is the place we need to remember and that is where we need to go regularly to remind ourselves and refresh ourselves.
Their aim is not to deny or negate the world of change but to visit and to remember the quiet peace that lies beneath the waves of the turbulent ocean. The exercise of remembering “not this, not this” reminds us that we are not these overwhelming situations nor our equally overwhelming responses to them. By remembering “not this, not this”, we may remember the deep peaceful ocean beneath the waves, even as we face those very waves.
~David Horan
Make Believe Boutique 
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick
How did you think of this? Wow. Just wow. Thank you.
Wayne Dyer reads this in one of his lectures. It struck me so, and I keep it in my notes… Some things just ring in my head, as this did when I read your blog that day