The following lyrics are from a song I wrote to celebrate my 40^th birthday.

I've been climbing on this mountain
for at least a thousand years,
My body and my soul cry out for rest.
So I try a little harder,
And a cry a little more,
And I always try to give my very best.

And at times I feel the anger,
and at times I feel the pain,
of knowing that it's never going to end.
You're a monster of a mountain
but I love you just the same,
'cause deep inside I know you are my friend.

I climbed upon your ridges,
and I've marched across your plains,
I'm a poet and a traveler and a man.
And every time I look into your face
somehow I know
that you can get no bigger
but I can.

The "Good Things Come in Strange Packages" Department

We all have our own unique paths to follow. As Seth points out, the intent behind (and before) a life may be anything from ease and comfort to protracted agony. It is a strictly individual matter.

It seems to me that it is not the degree of pleasure or pain in a life that tells the old souls from the young ones: it is the audacity and grace with which they are lived. I learned this from a skid row bum.

I was with a friend of mine to whom I made some disparaging comment about the bum. Her response was, "God don't make no junk." So I asked myself, "Okay, so if this guy isn't human junk, how else can I view him." Here's what I saw immediately.

Huddled in a doorway, I saw a man. I knew immediately three things: that he had willingly signed on for a rough ride, how little quality of life it takes to be worth sticking around, and that this guy was no amateur.

We all arrange the basic conditions of our life before we enter it. This includes our physical makeup, our parents, and environment. When someone takes on a difficult and challenging life, it tells me that they are confident and ambitious. To head down a path that puts one in a doorway bedroom takes guts. Amateurs don't accept those kinds of challenges. They prefer, and rightly so, training wheels. This guy wouldn't know a training wheel if it sat in his lap. He came to play the game in earnest.

Now Seth talks about probable realities--past, present, and future--and that we, as we think of ourselves, only experience one path through those myriad probabilities. I believe this with all my heart. But I also know that some probable gestalts include renditions that are not present in all probable life scenarios. So the man I saw in the doorway may have veered off a path that led him to the boardroom of a major corporation, or a ship at sea, or an early grave, or any number of other destinations. I am grateful, however, that at least in one of his probable lives he stopped by long enough to teach me something valuable.