– How significant can life be? – a pensive face behind the brooding question.
– As much substance as you give it. Don't just drift, move forward too!
– What do you have in mind?
– To my mind, we live two kinds of life here on Earth. One man drifts inescapably with his life, his fate carries him along, and beyond the stock situations nothing else ever happens to him. His fate is not a chance but a doom. He never becomes conscious of his own life, and he is utterly unable to influence his fate. The other man – let us perhaps call him the striver – lives a different life: in his case even everyday events are warmed through by a kind of fullness, and even if his life is a very insignificant one, the greatest miracle glints in it. This is the life truly worthy of man, the other is merely a sort of mosquito-life.
– What a thought, mosquito-life…? But is there a difference between the lives of animals? The life of a mosquito, or of some other creature… is one more precious than another?
– Every life is holiness, and each deserves respect. But in its own place. You respect the snake too, but from a distance – you do not nurse it in your bosom. You yourself feel that there is a difference between the life of a lion and the life of a mosquito… from a certain point of view there is.
– And do animals have a fate?
– I think so. Look, one creature is a lapdog pampered with everything, another an outcast dog. Of course, sometimes a man's life is a dog's life too…
– Hm, I could tell you stories about that. But to come back to it, how long does a man live a mosquito-life?
– Until we are ready, the other side is not ready to receive us. As long as you have not yet suffered through what you must serve out here, and have not learned what you can come to experience only here, in this life, there is no way out.
– And those who depart – are they all prepared by then? Has everyone already learned his lessons?
– I believe in the divine arrangement, that attention is there with us. That is to say, it may be that countless lives slip by that require no particular attention, that pass even without the personal intervention of Providence, without any event of note – mosquito-lives of a kind. We might also call it idling. But whoever is very bad, or for that matter very good, earns personal care.
– Personal care?
– I believe that beyond the visible there is an invisible reality, one that is even more important than the visible. These two realities run in parallel, and we usually do not even notice the more real one, so taken up are we with the visible illusion. And yet sometimes something gleams through, and fullness shows itself quite unmistakably. Perhaps this could be the purpose of life: to recognise this arrangement more and more often, to come ever closer to the divine will.
– Does one sense this? It seems so far away…
– Of course you sense it: when you protest fiercely against your fate, or when you are deeply grateful, that is an encounter with personal providence. You fall into the depths only until you hit the ground, but as for the heights, there is no limit.
– And if we had to sum up, say, what the significance of our life should be, or, as you put it, what substance we should give it…?
– If I say freedom, will you be satisfied? Free as the wind… One man is free outwardly, like a bird, bound by no limits and no pettiness. Another is free within. From outside his life seems nothing but bonds, yet within he is a free bird… seek out your own personal freedom. Spiritual freedom is very important.