As I sit here this last morning of this year, I pause to reflect. As I look back on this past year I have experienced more ways closing than opening. As I look ahead to the new year that will present itself to me in a few hours I am searching for. . .for what? For ways that might present themselves or perhaps for doors that I might open that will reveal a way for me. What will guide my search – or is it ‘who will guide my search?’ I love questions so perhaps there are a few questions that might help guide me today. Let me think. . . Here are four. These have no final answer; they are companions that travel with me on my life’s journey. As I hold them I am thinking of Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice to the young poet: ‘Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.’ Some ‘perhaps.’ Here are my four questions:
Who am I? What is my ‘essential’ nature – my ‘true’ nature and how do I find it? I have choice so: Who am I choosing to become? Why am I choosing this becoming?
What do I love? What I choose to love will shape who I am and provide the threads that weave my inner and outer life together into a seamless fabric.
How shall I live, knowing I will die? From my first breath I have been traveling a life journey that will end, now sooner rather than later. Someone once determined that a long life is about 650,000 hours thus far I have lived 595,680 thousand hours. Have I lived less by ‘accident’ and more by ‘purpose’? A disturbing question for me to hold.
What is my gift to my world? I am unique. My contribution, my gift, to my world therefore is also unique. What is it? What is the gift or legacy that I am called to give to my world? What have I received from my world? How do I balance the two – giving and receiving?
Gentle reader, as you live into this last day of this year, what questions emerge for you? What are the questions that you are holding that will be your companion as you open the door and prepare yourself to step across the threshold in 2013?
Searcher-Seeker 