I thought the image and framing a workable visual metaphor for my life: as a PK (preacher’s kid—both parents were clergy), my childhood and teenage years were significantly defined by Christianity. I was a believer, well enough.

Then I became agnostic upon the onset of college (at 17) and adulthood—during early adulthood, in my 20s and 30s, Zen Buddhism became a spiritual lodestar. That was not at all incompatible with agnosticism; in fact, they were complementary modalities. That is generally where I am now, in my early 50s, although the agnosticism has dissipated into an inchoate atheism. Maybe. And I say that because I still strongly feel and sense a universal force that, in essence, propels me forward.

That being to the ultimate destination in the background there—the eternal ocean, where everything ends up. My own body’s atoms and component molecules, specifically. So, yes.