What is this fragile reality we call LIFE? If you could hold it upside down and shake it out, all that would fall out is a handful of remnants and fragmented memories — between births and funerals, just a few broken hearts …

The grace of life, and the privilege of taking part in it, seeps away from our existence unnoticed — through the little cracks of busyness. A busyness that arose and grew out of the need to justify our being here. So important did our being here in the end become that the extravagance of excess turned into a burden. Our existence slows us down and has become a dead weight. Everything we hoard has to be stored, managed, protected or locked away. We live in order to exist, rather than exist in order to live.

Life is cheerful and carefree. It cannot be otherwise, because life knows only life and is meant to sweep us off our feet. The tension between living and existing is a seesaw where the amount of energy you pour, on any day, into one or the other of these opposites shows, at the end of a lifetime, whether you have lived or merely existed.

The inability to push the burden of existing aside so that you can live is visible in the epidemic of aids recruited to help the modern person come to rest. The art of switching off has long since been impossible without a pill or a drink. We teach our children the art of existing: they are taught how to brush their teeth, ride a bicycle, cross a street, get good marks, and avoid strangers, while the art of how to live remains an undefined mystery. Do yoga, exercise more, meditate. All of them solutions that isolate the human being further.

Without our soul, the dead molecules of our possessions are just as dead as the minerals of our body were before they came into contact with the soul. The greatest glory of the soul, which received divinity as its origin and a destiny, is to lift up and ennoble the material — to create a context for spiritual growth. Without the spiritual input and influence of the soul, our thinking would be earthbound and shallow. Focused on survival, we would regard the borders of our existence as markers of success and guarantee our own existence by neutralising everything that threatens it. This leads to competition, to tension, to conflict and to war.

The soul is invisible, which makes it difficult for the body to identify with it. Because what is invisible is also unreal. And yet we identify strongly with values, with feeling, with talent and with intellect, which are also invisible — invisible realities in the service of the ego and therefore easy to identify with. The soul is different, and stands in opposition to the material in the sense that it exists in God's time and is unacquainted with death or with perishability. The drawing of it into our existence usually brings a great deal of life with it. Long after the body has given up its privilege of occupying space and taking up time, the soul will still personify its lessons, its values and its relationships.

The art of living is also the art of living-together. The tension that relationships undergo tries almost every group, country, faith, community and family. We will only heal the visible reality in the same measure that we manage to integrate our existence meaningfully with our life.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer