I have a friend with the most amazing mind.  She holds immense knowledge and spends hours contemplating all kinds of things which my mind wouldn’t even give a passing thought to without her asking the question first.  The topics are wide ranging.  Things dealing with how we travel through this life, physically, emotionally, and spiritually; belief systems from both ancient and modern times; science, psychology and more.

In recent years, she has asked me a few questions which have triggered, unexpectedly, a really deep dive in my finding an answer.  She regularly contemplates from a perspective of expanded knowledge; I contemplate, once in a blue moon, by digging deeply and narrowly within myself.

The first such trigger question for me was “Who are you without your wounds?”  I’ve mentioned this before – my wounds are the traumas of my life.  She asked this not long after I learned of my neuro-diversity and as I can organise my thoughts best when writing, that’s what I started to do – and my first book Hidden In A Dark Place was born.

She recently set me on a similar journey when I was in the middle of an autistic meltdown.  She knows I best work my problems though by typing so she asked me, “Why don’t you write a fiction story about your autism and your meltdowns?”  It was probably phrased differently, my mind obviously wasn’t working very well just then, but I understood the gist.  The book was born almost immediately.  It is a fantasy called “In-Between Lives” and in little over a week I have written about a quarter of the book.  The words simply flow from my inner self – my silent mind, through my fingers and onto the keyboard.  My physical self works on the re-writes and edits!

About 12 hours ago my friend asked another such question.  It’s been sitting, silently, in the soft darkness of my mind, doing its own thing in the same way that grass grows without you ever being able to see or hear what is happening and, less than fifteen minutes ago, as I was getting ready to go to bed, my mind decided that it was time to write.  I know better than to ignore that urge.  When I do, I completely lose the information, so here I am, letting those words flow from my fingers without any conscious idea about what my answer might be.  The question? 

“From a soul perspective, not superficial, what do I want from this life?”

My answer is “Nothing.”

I’m in my 70’s.  The law of averages tells me that I have – give or take – ten years of life left.  My physical life has been filled with many experiences and I’ve also had the opportunity to explore spiritual beliefs;  plus, in the past five years or so, I have had the opportunity to answer those previously posed questions.  Finding those answers was painful, enlightening and releasing.

I have things from my past I want to resolve, things in my present I want to complete, but from soul level?  I have a strong feeling of already being where I need to be.  Physically aging, a mind filled with knowledge, experiences, and memories: they are all there even if I have difficulty accessing them.  

In the writing of this latest book, In-Between Lives, I am discovering a place to explore my beliefs and my imagination about what comes next.  And it is turning out to be one heck of a ride!