I’ve been ruminating over this post for the past couple of months and planned to use the end of the year as a deadline but it’s come and gone and I’m still trying to distil my thoughts and put words around them. I’m not sure if I’ve reached any conclusions but I think I’m getting closer, so here goes…

When I set off on this adventure I’d hoped there might be a journey within a journey. There was the physical journey, visiting all of our wonderful lighthouses which was pretty straightforward and provided a template for my travels, but I was also hoping that by spending time alone in some of the more remote and extreme corners of our continent it would allow me to clear my head and travel a parallel journey, an inward journey, an exploration of who I am, what’s important to me and what I believe in.

I’m sure this sounds self indulgence, and it is, but for a variety of reasons I find myself at a point in my life where I can reflect: grateful for all the good fortune I’ve enjoyed and remorseful for some of the things I’ve said and done that I wish I’d done differently. It’s also a time to think about the future, to prioritise the things I want to do before my time runs out, and to ask of myself some of the bigger and more profound questions that I haven’t had the time or inclination to dwell on until now.

Without realising it, it now seems ironic that by combining my lifelong fascination with lighthouses with a more personal journey, I was perhaps subconsciously hoping that the lighthouses might help guide me through these uncharted waters to reach the promised land, or a pristine tropical island at least!

The more I’ve thought about this personal journey the more I’ve come to realise the starting point has to be the most philosophical question of all – what do I believe in?

It seems to me that belief often gets confused with religion and separating these two concepts has been an important part of my journey. I say this with great respect because I have a number of close friends who are devout Christians and who have been encouraging me to and accept Christ as my savior for many years now with great patience and absolute sincerity. I know these people truly believe in what they preach and have my best interests at heart but for some inexplicable reason I always found myself pushing back whenever they tried to show me the way.

One of the undertakings I made when I started this journey was to read the Bible, something I’d never done, and I did try but in all honesty parts of the New Testament just didn’t convince me, and the ongoing friction and bloodshed evident in so many places around the World, (which sadly visited our shores at Bondi recently), which has been going on for centuries has the various iterations man-made religion at its source. Surely this is not the intention of any True Religion and doesn’t take us closer to God!

What I do accept is that religion can and does provide a central belief and community for many people and that having been brought up in the Christian tradition I try and adhere to these values. I also think the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament provide a guide on how to live an honorable life, but the ongoing abuse and corruption of these principles under the auspicious of institutionalised religions contradicts and devalues them in my mind.

Perhaps I was expecting, possibly even hoping for some sort of epiphany, some unblinding light and in it’s own way it happened, but not the way I expected, in fact quite the opposite. It crept up on me one starry night ~200km west of Alice Springs while I was camped within a ancient meteorite crater. Unsurprisingly this is a sacred place to the local Arrernte people, they call Tnorala and it’s woven into their Dreamtime, which at that time and in that place seemed more real and relevant than any other form of religion. It was not my belief and I didn’t pretend to understand it any more than I can pretend to understand other people’s religions. But that didn’t seem to matter because I felt it!

Here, in the stillness and silence I felt what timelessness is and understood the insignificance of our moment and it reduced me to what felt like a single atom, a tiny part of an endless expanse. But at the same time I felt a clarity, a strength, a fearlessness and liberation in knowing I was a part of this ongoing experiment, and all that has gone before and is yet to come is part of some unknown plan.

When confronted with the vastness of time and space in the outback you can’t help but realise the folly of our human perception that places us at the centre of the universe and us at the leading edge of time, when the indisputable reality is that both are infinite. And with this realisation comes an acceptance that everything we see, touch and feel is a legitimate miracle, the chance to share the moment with every other living and inanimate thing in the great arc of existence, where everything is in flux and nothing will ever be the same again!

If you choose to push it to the limit there may be some greater power, some divine force something you might call God, or Allah, or Buddha or Nature or, as I prefer, The Mystery. I accept there are things that we are simply not meant to know yet or maybe ever. I’m not an atheist because I’m open to the idea of there being a greater power, nor am I a nihilist because I don’t think life is meaningless, on the contrary I think we’re all on an incredible personal journey and we’re free to make up our own minds about what to believe in and what this life is all about, it’s our choice.

A few years ago I came across the phrase…“the Church of the Open Sky”… and that’s what I believe in!

At the other end of the spectrum the weird thing about trying to get to know yourself is not knowing if a lack of self awareness is normal? For as long as I can remember I’ve never really had a clear idea of who or what I was, and I wonder if other people are the same. I’ve alway felt I radiated someone who the rest of the World knows as me, but without knowing the person behind this facade. It’s not that I intentionally pretended to be someone I’m not, it’s just that I’ve always been more interested in what’s going on around me that in me and I often feel I know other people better than I know myself.

I’ve always quite enjoyed my own company but ironically by spending this time alone it’s given me a greater awareness of how important my family and friends are (both old and new), not out of loneliness but out of love and the recognition of our shared place and time. This fleeting and fragile moment of a shared experience, unique and precious.

I hope that by getting to know myself better, and becoming more self aware, I can become more perceptive and empathetic and get to know the people that are important to me at a deeper and more meaningful level. Now that I think about it I’ve always felt that I was surrounded by a moat that kept me at arms length from everyone, including myself, and I’m not sure if this feeling of detachment was by nature or nurture. But now I’d like to lower the drawbridge and let other people in and myself out, accept the fact that there will always be things we don’t or can’t understand about ourselves and other people, we all have our faults and fantasies and it is this, the human condition, that makes people so different and so interesting.

So it seems that what we believe and what we feel are opposite sides of the same window, and it’s only by looking out that we can see in.

I still haven’t found what I was looking for, but maybe I found something more important. Despite our insatiable appetite for knowledge and understanding maybe we should just accept that there are things that we don’t need to know and that should remain unknown, and to think of our existence as a beautiful moment in time, and to embrace The Mystery of it all.

Apologies if this sounds a bit morbid, far from it being an auto-eulogy, this is a message about the wonder of being alive! Don’t waste time, make every day count!

Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust – Point 2 Pointless!