Have you seen the "Big Chill?'  It describes how a group of former Sixties radicals come together for the funeral of a friend and, in the course of a subsequent weekend, discover that maybe they are not so radical anymore.  Many of them are quite wealthy; others have pursued occupations at which they might have laughed in their heyday.
     When I saw my friends from the "Movement" in 1991, I thought often of the "Big Chill." Not that any of us had "sold out," and not that any of us were extraordinarily well-off, but that, by and large, we have taken up rather conventional lifestyles--just like our next door neighbors!
     Yet when we got together this past August, twenty-four years later, although we all still hold conventional jobs, have had children and, in every outward respect, act like anyone else, I didn't think of the "Big Chill."  I thought of age and time.  I thought of how we stand on the verge of a different stage of life, I thought of how we remember our time those many decades ago as a dream whose full measure we may only now be able to see, and I thought about how many of us, now considerably farther along in life, are trying to grasp the full import of existence.
     And I thought, naturally, about the spirituality of it all.  What is the full weight of destiny?  If the afterlife is not an option, as many of us continue to believe, then when we leave this planet, the story ends.  And we will not be back.  If the opposite is true, as at least I believe, although I do not profess to fully grasp exactly what it comprises or means, and the story does not end at death, well, again:  the notion of destiny remains a bewildering one.
     To wit, even if it is not the absolute end, how do we picture the idea of destiny?  How do we picture the idea of end?
     Unless there's another end beyond it, sadly, we will never know fully.