LOOKING BACK AT YEAR'S END
As 2022 is winding down, I'm spending far more time than usual looking back. There's a lot to review in the last 70 years that, in the moment, often seemed like rinse and repeat.
As I re-examine experiences and interactions from my aging perspective, I am often surprised by newly discovered lessons from long past events. The progressive nature of learning presents one of life's greatest opportunities. To be clear, while I focus my greatest attention on living in the moment, the moments before falling asleep and after waking provide a wonderful opportunity to deeply re-engage things from years past.
2022 has been a particularly rich year for such musings. It marks the year that I (finally) fell in love with love. Yes, it took me this long to realize that Love is the mover, the motivation, the central driving force, the ultimate solution, the goal and, well, everything. It is both the reason why we come into existence and the reason our life spans time.
Using that perspective as a lens for your life's experience is surprisingly easy, hugely rewarding and, all too often, totally humiliating. The practice allows you to see value in experiences that seemed confusing or unrewarding at the time. The simplest act of observing anything in its natural state can achieve magnificence when you consider it as a loving result of time, connection or the existence of life itself. Looking specifically for evidence of love in human interactions (or, in some cases, evidence of insufficient love) allows you to appreciate others in a way you almost certainly didn't at the time.
Take it for what it's worth - or simply conclude I've become delusional, it doesn't matter. I've arrived at an understanding of the the soul-body connection that satisfies the often flailing explorations of organized religion's attempt to define and employ the prospects of an afterlife (for often nefarious purposes). For me, the soul is that small vestige of love that accompanies us into this realm, animates and guides us as far as we will allow as we live, and rejoins the full universe of love that is the one true existence.
Sting's song "May Your Soul Be Your Pilot" is useful in understanding this concept.
When you're down and they're counting When your secrets, all found out When your troubles, take to mounting When the map you have, leads you to doubt When there's no information and the compass turns To nowhere that you know well
Just let your soul, be your pilot Let your soul guide you It'll guide you well