“You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.”— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

It takes me a week to read the slightest of volumes these days, what with work and family and all they entail. I pity the individual who, young and involved in the fashioning of a career, a place in this world of ours—a life in short— hasn’t the time to undertake a protracted course of self-study.

How are they to divine what is of worth and what not? How are they to distinguish Gold from the dross in the busy noisome clamor of our day to day world? Who has the time to spare?

And that’s where they get you. Stop to smell the roses, ponder the imponderables, and you fall behind. You render yourself no longer of use. One day you wake from the dream-of-better-things with a rusty set of skills and you’re done. You’re an associate in the housewares aisle at Wal-Mart.

We are all caught in a state of entropy. Increasing order on the external plane, and disorder on the internal—until the internal manifests itself on the external that is. A soulstemic winding down.

But the crazy thing is: all is precisely as it should be!

The universe hums along its merry way, the galaxies whirl and sail through unimaginable reaches of space, countless suns dance around brilliantly black galactic cores warming their tiny planetary progeny, and on some of those planets scattered here and there throughout the universe, Life courses blithely along, oblivious at times to its eternal flow….

And at times, not.

Listen, and you too might hear its majestic hum.

Unless it’s too noisy where you are.