I consider myself tagged by my dear friend, Autumn Heartsong, to write this post.  On her blog, she recounts being invited to a gather where each person has five minutes and five minutes only to share their personal truth — no interruptions or judgments.  Just truth.  Just voices speaking aloud of the deep places they have been led and what they have seen.

It’s a daunting task, sifting through all of the things you know for *THE* thing you KNOW.  I’m not talking “head-know”.  I’m talking “gut-know”.  I’m talking “No I may not be able to explain it but that doesn’t make it not real” know.  That kind of knowledge is an initiation of its own, manifesting like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully formed and intrinsically powerful.  And just to carry my Olympus-analogy a little farther, sometimes we get the mid-life migraine beforehand, too.

So, this is my Five Minutes Of Truth.

I’m a typical Aquarian.  I’m sure my first word was Why? and my mother and father are in denial when they say it was Donald Duck.  I want to know the WHY of just about everything, to bust through the assumptions of societal programming and half-ass explanations.  I should have majored in Philosophy in school.  No one thinks it strange when a Philosophy Major gets turned on by the unanswerable questions in the Universe.

Like most everyone, I wonder why we are here.  Why we are born.  Why we live.  To what purpose and under what guiding star do we sail.  I remember reaching a point of utter frustration some time ago after going through a particularly difficult period in my relationships.  I couldn’t figure out why I was here, what the point of life was.  I mean, I have a wonderful relationship with my daughter, but kids should never be your life insurance policy.  If the only reason you don’t kill yourself is because of your children, that’s a hint that you need psychological help.

No, I wanted to know what was there to hold on to besides duty, obligation, love for offspring and responsibility towards them.  It had to be something bigger than career, bigger than family, bigger than making the world a better place, bigger than “being someone”.  These are human SHOULDS.  The key to remembering how I feel about the word should is:   should shares its first two letters – sh – with the word shit and the rest of the word – ould – is comprised of u (you) and old (which is how a pile of SHOULDS tends to make anyone feel after a while).  No, if life is feeling like a big To-Do-List made up by someone else, you have totally missed the point.

I remember quite vividly a night during the height (or should I say, the depth) of my depression.  I wasn’t really happy at the answers I was finding (rather, the lack thereof).  When that happens, there are only a few options available:  (a) an all-nighter reading the Bunny Suicides; (b) Haagen Daaz Chocolate ice cream and a big spoon; (c) Patron Silver tequila; or (d) a hot bath.  I’d loaned out (a), tried (b) last week, couldn’t find my (c), but dammit, I knew where the bathtub was!  So, I ran a hot bath, poured in my favorite oils, lit candles, put on relaxing music, grabbed the gel eye mask from the fridge, and proceeded to sweat out my sorrows until my fingertips were pruney.

I don’t know what possessed me to pray while I was giving myself the spa treatment, but I called out to Hathor.  And I let Her have it.  All my frustration, my anger, my sorrow.  Every instance of how unfair it was, every whinging drop of indignance and irritation.  I cried and cursed and when I finally fell still, said the word always on my lips:   WHY?

And that’s when I heard Her answer.

It wasn’t anything I expected to hear.  Maybe my expectations were a tessellation of baggage from my Christian upbringing because what I expected Her to say was something along the lofty lines of “you’re here to learn something” or “you’re here to complete an important mission” or “you’re here to repay some karmic debts and allow others to repay theirs to you”. These all sound pretty familiar, I’m sure.  No, Her answer was the farthest thing from that you could imagine:

YOU ARE HERE TO SEEK OUT, EXPERIENCE, BESTOW, CREATE AND EMBODY JOY.

She wasn’t saying that we don’t balance our karmic debts through living, or that we don’t learn and grow, or that we are not meant to contribute in some way to the story of the human race.  But as She opened the gate of wisdom, what I saw was that the reason we return to this life is for the chance to experience things again, for the joy of it, for the thrill of being in a body and knowing sensation on a physical level.  Even that which we recognize as physical pain is like water to a thirsty man for the being in non-corporeal form.  The Universe is intricate enough for us to fulfill multiple purposes at once, to play the part we need to play on a larger scale.

She pointed out to me that greater purposes, higher callings, karmic debt and repayment are all ways for the human mind to make sense of things when suffering occurs.  In other words, these things are high-minded rationalizations for a soul confined to the limited perceptions born of being an incarnate being.  But rationalizations are simply placeholders between moments of joy.

Hathor showed me the Door of Death, the Gateway to the Otherworld.  She said that the majority of life is spent in rooms we know as existence.  Death is simply the threshold between those rooms.  As human beings, we are not meant to linger in doorways, to suffer on the threshold trying to find meaning in coming to the party.  Likewise, humans spend too much time obsessing with suffering, too much time causing each other pain in order to have company there in the doorway.  And we waste our lives on the threshold, sure that the answers will come because it couldn’t really be so simple to just join the party.

Or could it?  Can you imagine what life would be like if everyone followed a path of joy?  Did what made them happy?  And don’t try and throw the argument by saying that child molesters and wife beaters and murderers and rapists would run rampant.  Seriously — do you think people commit those crimes out of HAPPINESS?  Come on… people commit those crimes because the pain inside them wells up, overflows, threatens to drown them and so, they take someone else down to avoid drowning themselves.

I know what JOY makes me feel like.  The things I am joyous about, I do for the pleasure of doing them.  The things that bring me joy are untouchable by the jealous and the spiteful.  The things that bring me joy fill me up and leave my cup full to share with others.  The things that bring me joy cause me to wake with a smile on my face and lie down at night with that same smile.  The things that bring me joy bring me health and happiness.  They make my time feel worthwhile and every moment feel full and bouyant.  When I am filled with joy, pain passes more quickly and I spend less time in doorways and more time dancing in the galas of new experiences.

What if it really is that simple?  I believe it is.

Follow your bliss.  Heal everything that impedes your bliss.  Do not suffer anyone else attempting to destroy your bliss.  Live your life as though your joy is your aim, your journey, your destination — because it is.  Spend less time on thresholds and more time dancing at the party.  All things happen for a reason and the Universe never wastes opportunity or energy — trust that the things that need to happen for you will happen for you.

Pain is like the points on a connect-the-dots:  we touch the dot, but we pass by it, often changing direction as we complete the puzzle.  Just remember that Joy is the path between the dots.  We can sorta tell what the picture will be by the dots (the pain) we’ve endured, but the lines (our joys) give the figure of our lives definition and flesh and fullness.  When the picture is complete, you really don’t see the dots anymore.  You see the whole of the creation as defined by the lines.

I watched The Bucket List last night and found my Truth echoed back at me in the movie.  The two main characters are dying of cancer and have decided to see the world, to do all the things on their list that they want to do before they “kick the bucket”.  In one scene, they are sitting atop one of the pyramids in Egypt and Morgan Freeman’s character begins to relate what happens at death in the Egyptian mythology.  As the soul stands at the gate of heaven, Freeman’s character narrates, the dead person is asked two questions:

Did you know joy? Did you bring joy to others?

These two questions sum up the goal of human experience for me.  After all, there is no better answer to the question of Why? than to say “For the joy of it.” And if I have experienced my joy so deeply that it brings joy to others, then yes, I can say without reservation that I have lived a good life.

Photo by Eddi 07 (via Flickr).