My Dad used to (well, actually still does) squint his eye and grin at us kids and say, “the day you stop learning is the day you die” and I’m coming around to seeing that he sure is right. I think somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind stuffed away in a pocket closet that I’d forgotten about long ago is the belief that someday, somehow I would “arrive” and I never stopped to question that belief too much in regards to the specifics. Like what clues to look for so that I would know that I had arrived.

I’m coming around to realizing that the “arrived” part is a moving target. That the minute I may think I’ve almost arrived, something always shifts and moves the arrive bull’s eye. And I think the moving bull’s eye is what keeps life interesting for me. I have always said that I want to always remain “teachable” and as some of my 12-step brethren say, “be careful what you ask for, you just may get it”!

Another thing I’ve realized is that there have been many times in my life when I have been in the act of arriving, and I defined it as something else besides having arrived because it didn’t fit the definitions I had at the time for having arrived. Now, looking back, I know I’ve had some pretty divine and sublime moments in life. One of my favorite movies is “Powder” (http://tiny.cc/gr5yy) which came out in 1995 and starred Jeff Goldblum. It was about this young guy who’d been born from a mom who’d been struck and killed by lightening. As a result, “Powder” was completely white and also had extraordinary psychic abilities. The whole movie was great like the scene where Powder and Jeff Goldblum come across a hunter who has just shot a deer who is dying a slow death and Powder calmly walks up to the deer and sooths it and grabs the hunters hand while touching the deer to pass along what the deer was experiencing to the hunter. But the scene I loved the most was at the very end when Powder is absorbed back into the ethers from a field during a lightening storm. I loved it for many reasons, but mostly because of the way Jeff responded. He was crying and laughing and amazed. The way Jeff showed how he was experiencing what I interpreted as the “divine” is the way I define “arriving” today.

It really doesn’t matter how beautiful our home is, though that is nice; nor how fun our cars are, though that is nice too; nor how famous and well known we become because in the end, I hope that we’ll be able to plug into some of our memories of life and say, “Dagnabit, I had one helluva great ride”. That’s what it is all about to have had such intensely rich experiences in life that we’ve not known whether to laugh or cry or a combination of both. That’s really living.

Today I worked ten hours at my part time job and made zest out of every lemon that came from me or someone else. I came home to my outdoor cats running up to me to say, “hello” and get some loving and Reality (the black Lab) rolling on her back on the living room rug in contentment as her Dad watched his show. Right now the black cat Rosie, is purring up a storm on my desk and the Paul-Paul dog is laying just about as close as he can safely lay up next to my desk chair without the wheel biting his tail. Today, I think I’ll take this as being good enough.

Today, I accept that somewhere in the universe of my mind…I am arriving….