Something in all of us strains for fulfillment. Some people spend their lives attempting to find it. They move eagerly from experience to experience. Nothing ever really seems to do it. But they keep looking anyway.

Others, though, roll like glaciers, slowly and ponderously, deeper and deeper into themselves as the years go by, becoming more and more taut, more and more quiet about life. They live it. They go on. But, far too often, they simply fail to thrive. They get to the point where they are simply living it out. Then, however much they go on breathing, they have stopped living. And they know it.

The missing element in life echoes like a chorus across the land. “If only we had a car, I could….” Or, “If only I had gone to school….” Or, “If only I had not gotten married….” “If only… if only… if only.”

There comes a point in life when, having stopped living, we decide that life is simply a sour kind of trap and we are in it. We look out from where we are like butterflies behind a Plexiglas screen. We cling to life, but never explore beyond it. As a result, we can see what we’re missing and we resent it, but we do nothing about it.

It’s the missing part that must be attended to while we still have enough life left in us to respond.

The missing part is what the spiritual life is all about. And every great spiritual tradition has always known that. “I fear that you will not reach Mecca, O Nomad,” Saadi of Shiraz once wrote, “for the road that you are following leads to Turkestan!” We can’t get what we don’t aim for in the right places by the right means. We cannot fill ourselves up with worthlessness and expect to find what is missing in us, or, even worse, to know in time how much we are really missing. We are restless for a reason.

If the question is, Why does it feel like something is missing in my life? the answer is because the feeling of emptiness is meant to move us on beyond where we are now to the fullness of life we are only here to discover.

— from Welcome to the Wisdom of the World and its meaning for you by Joan Chittister (Eerdmans)