Destiny

If you are here, you are meant to feel pain. You are meant to feel sorrow and create sorrow for another. If you are here, you are meant to fall apart. You are destined to have calamities in which all you have striven for dissipates into nothingness.

If you are here, you are meant to struggle in relationships. You will let the people you love down and be let down by people you love. If you are here, you are meant to judge and be judged. You will set your karma by judging another in what you describe as a wrongful action. You will live to experience a situation just as wrongful so that you gain compassion for yourself and others.

If you are here, you will feel want and need. You will feel the bitter chill of winter and not be able to warm yourself. If you are here, you will feel hunger and thirst, filth and disease. You will feel the pain of your body, sick with disease and feel the lonely struggle back to health.

If you are here, you will feel mediocre, and second guess your best ideas and achievements. You will feel lonely in a household full of people who know you. If you are here, you will feel the anguish and powerlessness that come from witnessing the wrongs that people create; starvation, devastation, consumption, pollution, rape, homelessness, war, politics, suburban sprawl, extinction.

If you are here, you will feel the pain of these things on many levels. You will feel the anguish of the loss of someone you have loved more deeply than you ever thought possible . You will want death to take you as well, if only for relief from the pain.

If you are here, you are surviving these things.

If you are here, you have hope.

You have seen sunsets and sunrises that bring tears to your eyes. If you are here, you have tasted food that allowed you to imagine heaven. If you are here, you have had your thirst quenched and achieved a state of warmth that provides you comfort. You have seen the beauty in a flower. You have marveled at the joyous behavior of children.

If you are here, you have been loved and possibly, you have loved.

If you are here, you have laughed. . You have had the opportunity to say, "I’m sorry." You may have suffered through devastation of untold magnitude, but you still have the ability to find joy. You may have lost everything, but found that as you live, you have the ability to find good in your situation. You may even have a sense of humor. You may find the comedy in your tragedy.

If you are here, on Earth, these things are true.

For if not for pain, how could we appreciate contentment? If not for cold, how could we savor warmth? If not for loss, how could we appreciate all that we have, when we have it? If not for compassion, how could we find ourselves free of judgement? If not for destruction, how could we create? If not for despair, how could we measure joy?

This place and time are not meant to be easy for us. It is designed to be a place of challenge and difficulty. How better can we learn but in this way?

If you feel uncertain at times, questioning your divine purpose, you are right on schedule. Have you ever stopped and thought, could this be my divine purpose, just breathing in and out with my senses ready to take it all in? Could it be possible that learning to be human, flawed, destined for mistakes and lovable anyway is the only real destiny? Any other worldly impact only being part of each individual’s experience? Is it possible that the greatest achievement is to live in love when things fall apart around you? Loving yourself through mistakes and mishaps. Loving others by making amends when you have done the hurting. Loving yourself and others by forgiving them for wrongs against you and reserving judgement for the actions of others. Could the greatest purpose be to love the gifts that you encounter on any given day and having the insight to see all situations from a higher perspective?

If you are here, as long as you are here, these things will be yours. They are mine and I wouldn't rush out just yet. For when it is over, when you are gone, when it is all just a memory, there's no way to return, except in that ghostly form of a memory. It may not seem as "bad" from a distance. I may seem precious though. I have a feeling it will and that this moment must be savored, this accomplishment of breathing in and out honored. I am doing it. My destiny.