Where are we going?

If we're lucky enough, life is full of options and choices, like escalators taking us to different levels of a department store. We strive to make something of our lives, to take control, to sharpen up our image, to become more efficient at... being ourselves. Just do it! To those for whom poverty or hunger deprive them of choices, our freedoms must seem like heaven. Yet often our choices feel as much a burden as a challenge, as we struggle with life and its meaning - do I REALLY want to do this or that?  We suffer from the luxury of indecision.

So much of what concerns us is, from a global perspective, merely the froth on a wave - to use one of Buddha's analogies. 

I have a hunch that, as we pass through life, we construct multi-dimensional maps of our environment, marked with point of significance and value for us. We find our way around by the things we care about. Looking into this existential map of our life is rather like looking down into this stairwell of escalators. We see, passing one way and another, different aspects of our life; some pulling one way, some another. Hopefully, on reflection, we see how we reached our particular floor; we may even choose where to go next.

I've been burdened, for much of my life, by philosophy: the compulsion to ask questions, to examine, to challenge. How much easier just to take what is given and take as authoritative whatever has a long history of acceptance. The think about religion is to enter into a love-hate relationship, where profound religious questions often battle with rather more superficial rational answers.

How much easier if life were like this...

Well, not necessarily Religious Education - suggested by the RE marker on the line - but life in general. If your life has been like this, you're lucky!

Nietzsche said that the secret of his happiness was a straight line, a goal.

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