Lessons In Life

I have told so many stories of what it feels like to cross for other souls; enough to fill a book. I often wonder what my crossing will look like. I’m not being morbid, it’s that each crossing I have witnessed was completely unique and reflective of the passions, desires, and the soul's connection to the Divine essence. My interests and experiences are so diverse, that I can’t imagine picking just one “theme”.

Will I become one with the Light like Maureen? Will I release all the baggage I have carried in an explosion of light like Lewis? Perhaps, I will simply walk down a dirt road into the horizon like Levi.

I know will not linger on the edges of a self-imposed purgatory like Kevin or wander in a maze like Cathy, trapped in the regrets of a lifetime.

Life on Earth is not a punishment. It is an Academy, an institution of higher learning where every soul comes to develop capacities that cannot be learned in any other realm. Some people move through this Academy with curiosity and intention. Others move through it in pain, confusion, or escape. Some, overwhelmed by the curriculum, try to numb their way through the lessons. Most of us are a combination of all of them.

I recently asked someone how they found their first year at college. They described the people, the parties, the camaraderie, but when I asked about the learning, their face soured instantly. ‘No one likes the learning,’ they said.” That line is the entire human condition in one sentence.

People love the experience of life, the connection, the novelty, the freedom, the identity building. The learning, the part that stretches them, challenges them, confronts them, that’s the part they resist.

I hope that when my time here is complete and I move into whatever comes next, I get the chance to express my gratitude to a tiny little teacher named Mrs. Deahl. She was the kind of teacher who slipped wisdom into the cracks of the curriculum. Somehow, she managed to get a class approved for the high school program called ‘Angels and Demons.’ It wasn’t about religion. It wasn’t about fear. It was about exploring how these archetypes, these symbols of light and shadow, shape modern society, influence human behavior, and live inside our stories.

At the start of every class, Mrs. Deahl would walk in, set her books down, look at all of us, and say, “Give me 400 words on the topic of the day.” Every time, my first reaction was the same, resistance, fear, the quiet panic that maybe this was the day I wouldn’t be able to do it. Maybe the words wouldn’t come. Maybe I’d stare at the page and fail. Then I picked up my pencil. The moment the tip touched the paper, something opened. The words didn’t come from me; they came through me. It was the first time I felt that unmistakable sensation of stepping aside and letting something wiser, clearer, and more coherent move through my hands.

I didn’t have a name for it then. I just knew it felt like truth. Looking back, that was my first experience with channeling. It was also the moment I fell in love with writing, not as an assignment, not as a skill, but as a doorway. A doorway into a voice that had been waiting for me to listen.

Every time I face a new challenge, at work or in life, in the quiet places where fear still knows my name, I feel myself carried back to that ancient wooden desk. I can smell the paper. I can hear the hum of the classroom. I can feel the weight of that pencil in my hand.
Just like I did all those years ago, I move through the same sequence: the first flicker of resistance, the familiar rise of fear, the doubt that maybe this time the words won’t come. Then something in me exhales. My hand reaches for the pencil, real or imagined, and the moment I ‘pick it up,’ the fear loosens its grip. That desk was the first place, I learned that when I show up, something shows up with me. That I don’t have to know how to begin. I just have to begin. The rest will flow through.

Perhaps when I leave this chapter behind, I will echo my friend D.K.’s exit. He was an avid learner, a relentless researcher, a man whose curiosity burned brighter than his physical limitations ever let on. Despite his scholarly nature, or maybe because of it, his rally cry was always the same; ‘Sex, Drugs, and Rock n Roll.’ It was his way of reminding the world that joy and irreverence were just as sacred as intellect.

When his time came, I didn’t see him slipping away. I saw him standing before a square tapestry, a mandala woven from the thousands of threads of knowledge he had gathered throughout his life. Every book he devoured, every theory he chased, every question he refused to stop asking, every song he sang, all of it was there, stitched into a pattern only he could have created. In that final moment, he didn’t disappear. He became the light at the center of it. He became the final thread, the one that completed the design he’d been weaving his entire life. It wasn’t an ending. It was a culmination.

D.K. left the way he lived, with curiosity, irreverence, intellect, humor, and a mind that refused to dim itself for anyone.

Nothing about life is random, everything connects to everything. The way people love connects to the way they grieve. The way they cope connects to the way they break. The way they learn connects to the way they leave. The way they live connects to the way they exit. Not because the universe is grading them. Not because life is scripted. But because patterns repeat until they resolve. The final moment is simply the clearest expression of the pattern that shaped the entire life.

People exit in the signature of their life. When the signature is distilled down to its purest form, what remains is love. When everything else falls away, the fear, the coping, the identity, the story, love is the only thing that doesn’t dissolve.

It’s the thread that holds the tapestry together. It’s the thread that completes it. Because In the Light, We are All Love.