"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 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 it 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."

    Yet if life really is incomprehensible, why do we try so hard to think we'll ever understand it?  We try because we think 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.

    We're helpless before what we do not know.

       Who are the Funhogs?  The Funhogs were a group of men, now in their seventies and eighties who, many decades ago, spent their days roaming across the planet in search of adventure.  Some of their names may be familiar to you.  They include people like Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing manufacturer Patagonia; Doug Thompkins, founder of the outdoor equipment company The North Face; and others who are not as well known:  Dick Dorworth, once a prominent skier, Chris Jones, and Lito Tejada-Flores.

     The Funhogs are perhaps most famous for their epic 1968 driving journey from California to the tip of the Americas, where they successfully summited the formidable Fitz Roy in, of course, Patagonia.  They reached the top on Christmas Day.

     1968 is a long time ago, yet the Funhogs still look back on that year as one of the highlights of their lives.  As Thompkins later wrote, "So I give thanks, as I look back, that fate played its mysterious hand guiding me along a wonderful path, in a life with never a single moment of regret.  If I could play it over, I would let it go just as it has, with all the minor bumps that came with it.  Just like those bumps along the last 900 miles from Bariloche to the Fitz Roy valley--sometimes a bit uncomfortable, but still very enjoyable all the way."
     

    Thompkins's words surely underscore the joy and marvel of life, whose twists and turns he attributes to fate and its mysterious hand.  Don't we all wonder why life goes the way it does?  Do not we all occasionally sit back and ask ourselves how it is that we ended up where we are today?

    As we enter into 2025, we should.  Are our lives a collection of glorious moments mysteriously enabled by swirls of impersonal fate?  Or are our lives a collection of glorious moments grounded in the intentional swirlings of a personal God?  In other words, are we glorious moments without a reason to be, or are we glorious moments with every reason to be?