Life is not a chain of events but an area, something spreading out from a hidden centre and welling at once toward all points of the compass.

Stephen Graham

I offered up this quote as part of a writing prompt in one of my writing groups recently. I really liked the quote when I chose it. It spoke to me about the haziness of life, the messiness of it, the fact that it isn’t linear, that we can travel in all directions of the compass at once, go nowhere and everywhere.  It also made me think of Paul Coehelo’s The Alchemist and how busy we can be taking journeys only to find what we were searching for was at home all the time. Or welling up inside of us.

It also made me think about the times in life we can feel like that, like we are trying to head north, south, east, west, just trying to get somewhere but, confused and overwhelmed, where we are headed is kind of hidden from us. That maybe we never really know where we are going. But the journey itself matters and what our intentions are, what the meaning is at the hidden centre of it. That meaning and value are the hidden centre that wells up in us, even if it takes us time to work out what that hidden purpose us. That perhaps there are points in our lives when we take time to pause, look back and reflect, that it is then that the hidden centre can be untangled from all our efforts to go in this or that direction.

It’s a quote which can be read in many different ways and perhaps that what drew me in, the ambiguity. How do you find yourself responding to it? How do you experience your life at the moment? Are you heading in a clear direction or does your sense of purpose feel hazy and hidden?