I've never thought much about meditation or finding some sort of spiritual peace through another culture's beliefs or religious tenets. My spiritual side seems to be permanently entangled with what I regard as my common sense. That's not to say that I find meditation or what have you nonsensical or ridiculous. I just feel as though my thoughts and emotions already come out of my spiritual side. Meditating would be like walking around outside with an oxygen mask strapped to my face. I can breathe just fine without it.

At the same time, I do wonder how spiritual a person I actually am. I suppose "spiritual" is a word I've used to describe myself since I was able to admit that I wasn't particularly religious. I find it difficult to believe in the finer points of anyone's God and rely more on impressions that I've gathered from being alive. In that, I'm spiritual. When I think about meditation, I think of it in the context of something that's needed when our wiring starts to overheat. I believe it allows a person an opportunity to relax and think themselves past a problem that's interfering with their happiness. It helps a person gain perspective, if not an "insight" into God's plan, even if that plan takes the form of a general universal harmony without a figurehead.

I'm a curious person. I wouldn't mind knowing how this whole life business got started in the first place and for what reason, if there is a reason, I'm conscious in this mind and body at this moment in the history of the world. It seems convenient that this vast expanse of a universe was created and none of it would have ever been so much as perceived if life hadn't sprung up. What would the point of the sun, moon and planets have been if we hadn't been around to figure out how they work? Maybe they would have been acting elements in a play we can't yet comprehend, put on by intelligences far greater than our own for their amusement, though one would tire of the repetitiveness of orbits and asteroids after milennia, wouldn't they?

Maybe time is perceived differently by greater intelligences, if they do exist. Species of Arctica islandica (mollusks) have been discovered to live for over 400 years. What would a year be to a man who lived that long? As human beings, we're aware of the average age at which we're bound to keel over. We have a common perception of time expressed in a completely physical term. I guess meditation helps some folks think of it in terms of the soul. It helps lift some of the weight of mortality.

I'm quite confident that I have a soul. Whether I'm bound for a destination of paradise or damnation is another story. Must it be one or the other? Why would the afterlife be so much more definite, so much more black and white than the physical world? Would the seemingly infinite facets of human intelligence be forced into line, the mind shackled in the ethereal state after years of being shackled to the physical body? But I'm confusing the soul with the mind. Maybe the soul is the part of us in between emotion and thought, the carrier that cradles the two and experiences hurt when they go into two directions.

All these years of human life and now all this information at our fingertips and we still haven't seemed to trip over the one piece of information that answers it all. We probably won't. The grand answer will be kept grand, I think, because why deny life the opportunity to recognize itself as such? You're alive. Have an ice cream cone and give a chuckle. Yes, we feel pain. Life gets downright unbearable. When it comes down to it, the only alternative is to not have it. It seems natural to me. I have the opportunity. My mind and heart recognize it, and so I live.

I browse the CBC news websites quite frequently at work. Today I came across this article, which details the near-miss of a 10-story-sized asteroid that flew by the earth at a distance of 72,000 km on Monday. The article says that astronomers didn't know about it until Saturday.

The article compares the asteroid with one of a similar size that exploded over Siberia in 1908, devastating the landscapes with the force of 1,000 atomic bombs. That was called the Tunguska event (More on that here).

There is a lot of talk in the astronomy community lately about finding another Earth in the extrasolar regions of the Milky Way. This Friday, NASA is launching the Kepler telescope to take a closer look at the orbital patterns of Earth-like planets.