Life is like a smooth slick bowling alley lane.

First, I want to say that I am a spiritual seeker and do not consider myself affiliated with any systems or religion. Over time, I developed a theory about life and what it all means. The best analogy I could come up with was that of a bowling alley lane, here is why. I see myself as the ball and the ride of life is the smooth and slick hard maple flooring with the end of the game being where the pins are. Some folks get a whole lane (long life) and some people get a short lane (a life cut short). I believe right from the beginning our lane length is set, we have a preset expiration date when we get here. There will be more about free will and destiny later on. So then I see the width of the lane as our available options or life choices, to get to the pins. Basically, we can traverse back and forth from gutter to gutter and we are still going to make it where the pins are. What I mean here is that once the ball either knocks the pins over or rolls past the pins into the mechanism, that is what delivers us to what is next.

So how did I get to that and what comparisons did I draw to get me to this theory? First, the slick and smooth maple flooring is analogous to how our lives can seem to be moving along wonderfully straight (first few feet of the lane) and without warning the ball hooks in on the pins, depending on your skill level in the game that “hook” could be anywhere and have different reactions over the length of the lane. The “hooks” in our lives can come at any time and depending on our skill level and how we react with anything from a gutter ball or we work it out and get a strike. Gutter or strike, it is not important, the important thing is getting to the pins.

So we have the pins, they are setup at a point when our time is up, expiration date or the end it doesn’t matter what you call it but it is the end of this life. The distance down the lane where our pins are set, being placed by “something” akin to a pin setting machine, is preset. This preset location in the length of the lane is my explanation of why some perfectly healthy people drop out at a young age and others who drink and smoke for 70 years are still kicking. We get a predetermined amount of lane length, like in game of bowling, the pin location is predestined by the machine setting them on the lane. I recognize that may seem like it would interfere with freewill, my theory attempts to reconcile that in a bit.

We could roll the length in the gutter (we could be a murderer) or we could have that beautiful hook and hit a perfect strike (we could have lead a good and moral life). We still get to the pins, the end. My theory tracks that no matter what path you take you will wind up with all that you need for whatever is next. WHAT! If you are a follower of most official religions your life choices will have determined your fate, either heaven or hell. If you are Buddhist you will have accumulated karma (either good or bad) and be reincarnated as a lower form if you have accumulated bad karma or a higher being if you have accumulated good karma. I have not reconciled what the deal if with agnostics or atheists’, sorry.

So now we get to the width of the lane plus gutters and how we correlate that width, or how we reconcile the differences between free will and destiny. I do not believe it is one or the other, like all things in life there is balance, yin and yang, all phenomenon exist in equilibrium. I believe that we are working within the width of the lane (destiny) BUT we have that whole width (limited free will) in order to get to the pins. What does that mean? We can not deny that that the rhythms of the universe impose upon us some limitations or lane width, that does not remove our ability to move through life in many different ways. So we have freewill, but within a predefined destiny just like all things, not one or the other but a balance of both.

So once we reach the pins there is a “mechanism” that delivers us to what is next, talked about earlier. That mechanism is unique for each of us, depending on the length of our lane and the outcome of the choices we made in life the machine runs at different speeds. We might end up in purgatory for a period of time, we may have to spend more lives as a lower life form before making it to the final destination.

So what do you believe?