Seeing beyond ourselves to the horizon is central to predicting the future. The ingenuity of our ancestors being replicated through a motivation to connect with the divine. To what makes us universal.
What the earliest shaman conveyed saying the sky’s the limit as we look to the stars as well. What is it that inspires us? Music and those who perform it, talented artists like Monet, athletes like our favorite sports stars, writers, authors, and philosophers. Or certain places or periods of history that joggle our minds and memories. Those current, as well as those we have known through the ages. Knowing that their history is our history too. Even adding an empty chair next to ours asking them to share their experiences, stories, and wisdom with us and to stay. Inviting them into our thoughts as we join them. How are we to take their trials and tribulations as examples of how we should model our lives
and actions to emulate, find, and remember the best of ourselves? Or those we feel give us divine direction or guidance like Christ, Budda, Mohommed, or others. Who or what is it that inspires, or ignites, our spirit that propels us to our greatest endeavors and destiny?
Just where does our imagination take us as we enter the universal flow that connects us to what lies unknown often simply as fear, but to act as a guide until we decide to go there? With fear taking us to places we otherwise would not go beyond the status quo. Just where is it that meditation and prayer and seeing ourselves as our own reflection can reside but as virtue? Even as we ask ourselves imagination and virtues purpose.
For myself, it begins with words either read, spoken, or written. Or even to that which is left unsaid but obvious. With what our eyes see reflecting on the past that moves us to the future. As what can be that belies or tells us, of an institutional memory we possess, and actions that move us, asking are we following a script and do we have a plan going forward. Even if only for eternity’s sake, can something be written until we write it?
Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole and the line in the movie Lawrence of Arabia when Sharif says “it is written” when a man falls off his camel in the desert and is destined to die. O’Toole’s character goes back retrieves the man and returns saying, “nothing is written until I write it,” As if we each have endeavors to fulfil before we move on. I saw this movie back in 1963 in the sixth grade and bought the soundtrack album and used it as a turntable. It was an
epiphany. I still have it on my play list of music I regularly listen to. It reminds me to remember from where I came and where I still travel. I am reminded though, that O’Toole’s character, Lawrence, had to later kill the man he had earlier saved for the greater good. He himself later dies in the movie in a motorcycle accident upon returning to England.
The challenge is always to be content with our own legacy. That we are a divine spirit in a human body.