When we're in our twenties, our eyes are on the future. We are swept along by strong passions and big dreams. Everything, no matter how unlikely, is possible. Time doesn’t exist except as something that is always in our way as we rush forward eagerly, into love, into career, into whatever adventure will come next. We’ve got “all the time in the world.”

In our thirties, we move forward with purpose and plans, building personal and professional relationships, seeking our unique path and striving for our goals, and wishing that tomorrow would come sooner.

In our forties we reach maturity and our mental and vocational prime. Our lives are busy and complex, and our thoughts are about tasks, successes, places, and actions.

It’s not until our fifties that we begin to consider how much time there is is ahead of us, and how much there is behind. Will there be enough of it, to do all the things we want and need to do with our lives that we haven’t done yet?

The question of eternity rarely ever crossed my mind in my 20’s and 30’s. Even when it did, it was a fleeting moment of vague curiosity, and itdidn't seem important or relevant at the time. As I find myself in this lifetime now closer to the end than the beginning, it becomes a much more significant question.

Is life eternal? And if we are re-born reincarnated, do we know? Is there something in us, some part of the I Am that still knows who we were, and thus, we still are? Or do we forget it all? Or worst of all, is mortal death really the end of everything, so that whatever we did or didn’t do in this lifetime won’t matter anyway?

I don’t believe it doesn’t matter. I know with certainty that even the smallest things we do, matter enormously, not so much to us or to the physical world, but to the overarching Greater Life that is God/the universe within us.

There is a place for each of us in the plan of things, and the life of each one of us is an expression of the Life of God. Things we do to help and sustain the life and joy of any other being, help and sustain the life and joy of the universe.

I believe in the reincarnation of souls eternally, even though I don’t understand the mechanics of how it works. It would make no sense at all to live and experience and learn and grow through all of this life, if there were no purpose and use for that knowledge and understanding beyond just one brief mortal lifetime.

One of the most basic and primary tenets of New Thought is that each and every human being is an individuation of God. That is, each of us, everywhere, is an act of God expressing. We are all God. God is eternal, and If God is eternal, then so are we.