Run the gamut. This extravagant series of events. The miserable downs, the elated ups, and all the mundane-ness in between. This life…what a ride.

Have you ever felt like you’ve seen the end of something, just to realize that you’ve only just begun? Like a movie which seems to be approaching a neat and tidy ending which then explodes into a 16 part series that you never saw coming?

Sometimes life is like that. Like I push and push and believe that I’m approaching the end, and then realize how little I really know. How all this movement I’ve been making has only been to get me to the starting line. It makes me wonder if this whole life is but a prologue to the journey that lies beyond.

But within this prologue, if it is to be true. True that the human experience is but a fraction, a glimpse of the whole, there is still a wholeness that we can experience. To further the understanding imagine this. Within the sport of football there are rules, and strategies, and techniques. And as you learn more about the game, you develop a greater picture of the whole. Spending your whole life studying you may come to know the game very well. But beyond football there are other sports: rugby, cricket, basketball, and together they comprise a more generic ‘sports’ by which the context of ‘sport’ expands.

So what I’m suggesting is that while this human life may give us the picture of a ‘whole’, that whole is specific to a limited experience. So while we swing between the poles of limited extremes we know not of what lies beyond.

And so this universe is vast and I acknowledge that what I experience may only be a fraction, but that fraction, like the rainbow and the spectrum of visible light, is nothing short of a splendid miracle. And true to the polarity of experience it is also possibly a vile mistake. But I tend to lean towards the splendid miracle.

I am reminded daily, by my better nature, that life and the very ability to experience is something worth cherishing. I tell myself, ‘peace is in the awareness itself’, and it makes marvels out of the mundane.

Where others see only pain, I can find possibility.

While the nihilists will assert that life is meaningless, I find meaning inherent in life. Experience itself is meaningful. And to perceive the breadth of the human experience is a miracle of proportions nothing else I’ll ever know can compare.

And so I celebrate life throughout the ups and downs, knowing that it is the ups and downs that make the picture whole. It helps me stay balanced through it all. I do not sit and negate the experiences I have, becoming a senseless blob of emptiness. I feel deeply, but I can smile at the grief and the gaiety. And for that I am thankful.

One of the greatest gifts I could ever wish upon another is the ability to experience all of life’s challenges and triumphs without attachment. It is a tool which helps me embrace change. Which helps me learn and grow and move towards a brighter tomorrow.

There is a calmness that washes over me as I sink into the now-ness of the moment. As I feel my body, as I identify more with the breath which moves through me than the ideas of who I am.

I feel as if I touch the eternal. Not when I stretch myself beyond the beginning and end, but when I realize that the eternal is not subject to time. It is the state which births time and space. And that cannot be proven by a science built upon time and space. It is an inner standing which defies logic.

I see the rainbow in the sky. Colours blend into one another. I see compliments and contrasts. Theories built on and around what is. But what is IS before any theories surround it. Before any explanations compound it into something known.

The beauty of experience stands tall as proof of the immaculate conception. The birth of something from nothing. Matter and mind – children of the infinite unknown. Sometimes I sit in awe knowing how little I can ever really know. But feeling in my bones the truth of the timeless infinitude which spawned this being-ness.

With reverence I sit still. Giving thanks for the experience. For all the colours of the rainbow. For all directions. For emotion itself and all the tints and shades it expresses as. And acknowledging this helps me dwell in states of greater levity and clarity. I experience peace when I allow things to be – when I stop trying to force and experience the truth as it is.