Ok, so maybe the title of this post is a bit of a stretch but today I am thinking about souls and well, thats what I've got. So, no, this post is not about war or soldiers or anything like that...well, who knows maybe it will be!
I was going through some pictures today from the past 5 years or so and was surprised at just how different my friends look. Sure I look different too, but I was particularly struck by the fact that these people who I see every day changed right before my eyes, somehow unbeknownst to me. My inital reaction was, wow, I'm old. Okay, I'm barely 23, but these baby-faces of my friends are just not so baby-like anymore! This moment of self-pity was cast aside when I realized how much more comfortable everyone seems in their own skin now. So on the down side, we are no longer shiny-happy teenagers, and on the upside, we are no longer shiny-happy teenagers! So I asked myself, what has really changed? And thats how I got to thinking about souls.
The general conception of the soul is that it transcends material existence, is outside our anatomical makeup and has the potential for eternal life. It is the part of us that goes to heaven, or gets reincarnated; choose your afterlife...the soul goes there. There is the concept of divine judgement that basically decides the fate of the soul, eternal life, or eternal death. By I digress.
Assuming that our soul is born with us (or maybe its floating arbitrarily until we are born and can make it our own) it follows that this mystical body grows up with us. This is where, for me, it starts to get a little tricky. As babies, do we have a baby soul? A tween; a teenager; a young adult soul?
You always hear people say "people don't change", if in fact we have the one soul that never grows up, never changes, maybe this is where we can place the blame for our inability to make significant changes in our lifestyle, our psyche. (The old, "I can't help it, it's just the way I am, defense).
But this can't be it, because we do change. We see the good in someone we never did before, we decide to seize a moment when normally we would have hesitated, we do something brave or something weak. Our souls are outside of us, sure, but they must be learning from our experiences and growing with us. So how many souls do we get? Is there a difference? Does it matter?
I put down the pictures of my friends and opted to let this question go for now. I started by saying everyone seems more comfortable in their own skin and that is a gift! Whether it is because we exchanged our awkward teenage souls for the ones we're toting now or not, we are slowly, maybe, becoming soldiers for our own cause (and there is it, I made the title work afterall!)
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
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