"Life is all a sublet anyway, of course.  We don't fully own even the bodies we live in; we can't stop them from changing."  So writes Bonnie Friedman in a recent issue of Utne Reader, thinking about the nature of change.  So true.  On the one hand, we may feel helpless against the progress of time and aging, powerless to halt our demise; on the other hand, we may feel comforted and, I suppose, innervated that, try as we might, we will not be complete in this existence, for this tells us that when all is said and done, existence will never be anything we control.  We're no more than wayfarers and sojourners, sailors on a voyage of, as poet Rainer Rilke put it, a life that is "incomprehensible."
     And that's the point.  If life really is incomprehensible, why do we try so hard to think we'll ever understand it?  We try because we think and know we can; we try because we, consciously or not, believe this life to be more than a "sublet."  We try because we believe that life is more than what we see.  Life will always be this way, for life, like everything in it, is not of its own making.
     So does the psalmist say, "It is you, Lord, who has made us, not we ourselves" (Psalm 100).