Someday each of us will come to the place of high promontories before the final mountain pass where shadows obscure the way ahead. Those of us with presence of mind may choose to halt there and take stock of everything we have done--all our choices, experiences, failures and accomplishments will be laid out on the land below and seen in the slanting, dusted light of the late afternoon. What we will see is that everything bad has been mixed with something good, however small, and everything good has been mixed with something bad. We will see our foolishness, our pain, our pettiness as they walked beside us throughout our lives, but on our opposite hand was purpose, and love and soulfulness, which is larger even than life. We will view the map of our lives from such a distance that we can finally accept the whole beautiful, jumbled mess at once, as if the paths we went had been something preordained from the very beginning, and to have known life at all, at every single moment, was to have perfected the human art of imperfection.

Once we bow our heads, and turn our clouding vision away from the landscape below, we will wend our way up through the final mountain pass, and enter into the shadows on the fringes of this world where the making and unmaking of life occurs. I would like to think that for a moment we will hear a concord of infant voices crying out as they pass us heading in the opposite direction. And before we fade into the final dark, we will whisper our blessings on these little human beings whose entire lives stretch before them without limit or constraint, and whose identities are still so shapeless and unformed that they are nothing more or less than the infinite promise of a newborn life.

Oct 11, 2012