This is one of my favorite articles written by Martha Smock 35 years ago depicting our life or many lives. I hope you enjoy this as well.

If we were to stand on a high hill and watch in the valley below the progress of a stream, we would see its breaks and turns, we would see its varying widths, we would see clear and clouded areas, still and troubled stretches. But we would see it as one stream, flowing into itself.

If we were to stand off from ourselves and from some high and mystic hill look down on this we call our life, it would not be unlike a stream, and we would see, with eyes free from the curtain of past or future, how days, months and years flow together, how all is swept along in the ceaseless progress of the soul.

There are no isolated incidents in life though there may seem to be. No experience comes to us that is completely foreign to our consciousness, that has no relation to what we are. The happening that seems to change our whole life, cannot, does not stand unrealeated to the past or future, but flows from the past and is absorbed into the future.

How soon the stream of life flows on. What we are today is the result of all that has gone before. If we could, we would not exchange our experiences for those of anyone else in the world. We would not be the unique individual that we are without our particular background, without having passed through the experiences that life brought to us, without having made the mental, emotional and spiritual growth that we have made through the years. In the honesty of our soul we must admit that we would not want to be any one else even if we could be. What we really want to be is the best possible self that we are capable of being.

We may ask ourselves; What is the purpose of life? Why am I here? We may not be able to see our purpose clearly, we may not be able to understand ourselves or our life from a human standpoint, but if we will think for a while on a different plane, if we will ascend the hill of Truth, we shall get a view of ourselves and life that is beautiful and inspriring, that reveals new horizons and possibilities for growth and good. We are a living soul on a living voyage, without begining or end.