The idea of our lives as a journey is a very old one – Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, for example, and our language is filled with journey metaphors. We talk about ‘reaching a crossroad’ when faced with a major decision or ‘reading the signs’ when looking for guidance. But what is this journey we call ‘life’?
A reader sent me a message some time ago and in it she wrote the following (repeated with permission, of course):
I work with Tarot. The Fool is called in older decks The Juggler and is often seen balancing on one foot while juggling. One summer, when my daughter was seven, she came up with the idea that she would like to draw her own tarot deck. I gave her some blank index cards and left her to it.
A couple of days later I asked how her project was going.
She pulled me into her room to show me. The fools card was very interesting. It showed a man dancing along a narrow path. He looked a bit like Indiana Jones. I just asked her, wasn’t that path suppose to be invisible?
“Nope,” she answered. “He knew that path wasn’t supposed to be seen, it was supposed to be felt. That’s how he is balancing.”
I had worked with the cards for years and had learned many lessons, but my daughter taught me much that day.
There was something about this story that I really liked, though at first it seemed to me contradictory. But then the wisdom of a seven year old has a certain purity and logic that is often lost on us adults. Well, this adult anyway.
Reading the story several times now, I find some wonderful imagery.
We are all dancing Jugglers
There are so many things to balance, balls to keep in the air. In many parts of the world life is really quite complex and how often do we drop the ball? It’s not always easy to know what is most important and what can be safely discarded. Juggling is frenetic, skilful and can be a beauty to behold when we find our balance and our rhythm.
We are all Indiana Jones
Life is an adventure, a journey to be travelled. It’s full of exciting places to explore and discover, experiences to savour and dilemmas to face. If we choose to take the journey, that is, rather than watch it as an observer. Indie could have stayed put and carried on lecturing at his university, but he chose to get out, solve mysteries, recover ancient wisdom and artifacts. He was also courageous, got beaten up a lot but ultimately was a hero, albeit a fictional one. Don’t we all have the hero inside us? Don’t we all have the spirit of adventure waiting to burst out?
We are all Fools
I take my life’s journey way too seriously at times. Writing about nonviolence is not always light and cheery stuff, I realise, but in the scale of the universe there’s nothing we humans have ever done, are doing or will ever do that is really so important or serious. We are just ‘dust in the wind’ to quote the song, and whenever I believe any different, then I’m a Fool.
Our paths are supposed to be invisible
We walk the path of our lives never knowing for sure what’s ahead. No matter how intelligent we think we are, we can not see the future. And if we did, then would there be a purpose to our lives? If our paths were known to us then what would our free will and our actions mean? It would be like reading the last page of a mystery novel – there’s really not much point then in going back and reading the rest. Or at least it takes a lot of the pleasure out of it.
Our paths are revealed to us
I’m a great believer in signs. As in a real trip, we often take a map and rely on the signposts to help us move forward. With life, we know our destination. In human form our end point is death. There are many theories about what might happen after that, but death is certain for all of us. The important thing (to us as individuals) is the path we take to get there. Signs, if we choose to read them, help us on our way. We can miss the signs if we’re not attentive, and we can misread the signs, but they are all around and within us to reveal parts of our journey.
Felt not seen
We know when we’re on track. We know it because we feel it and our minds can understand that. Provided we learn to listen to what our feelings are telling us. Provided we allow our minds to do what they do well and not allow them to get cluttered up with all the rubbish we feed into them.
When you look in the mirror in the morning, is the person you see smiling back at you. If so, they are probably on their path.
