The toast pops up, Jeb’s breakfast is ready. I’m wrapping up a quick morning catch up on the phone with my girlfriend who lives in California. She’s just dropped her kids at school and has pulled up to her next appointment.

She and I, we grab these windows. Try to make our time on the phone potent within the frames we’re given.

At the end of our conversation, she leaves me with some gems. Three questions, ala Deepak Chopra. The “Soul Questions” that he suggests be asked, daily, before going into meditation. I wipe the butter from my fingers and jot them down before we say goodbye.

Who am I?
What do I want?
What is my dharma (life purpose)?

Deepak’s advice: “Ask the questions…and then live the answers.”

So I don’t have a daily meditation practice. Even my regular yoga practice has had a hiccup since school ended and summer has Jeb home with me in the mornings. So I’ll do the hybrid thing for now and just try to remember to contemplate these questions throughout my day – like when I’m washing dishes or chopping garlic.

Or, like now, when it’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m typing at the computer. All is swirling around in my early morning head and there seems to be some thread between Deepak’s questions and that Stan Lee documentary we watched last night. The one featuring all of these people doing “superhuman” things.

Take Eskil Ronningsbakken of Norway, for example. What’s his dharma? I don’t know but the man has certainly found his place – right in the pocket – to be able to balance himself in such precarious positions. His epic aerobatics manifest the visual proof of being perfectly in the moment.

As I drive to my next appointment and juggle summer camp, work and the monthly phone bill, it’s a stretch for me to remember to ask my soul questions. But if I don’t, I can watch myself fall down into a rabbit hole of rat-race nonsense, so bleak and hopelessly unbearable.

I try to give that gaping, vacuous hole a wide berth. Stay far from its sucking edge. But some days its pull is stronger than others.

These Deepak questions seem to be a panacea for falling into this senseless abyss. My soul longs to live the answers. But how?

I suspect Deepak and Eskil probably have a phone bill to pay, too. But they seem to be mastering that sweet spot. Lingering at some consummate threshold – the true Divine – where the mundane and the profound entwine.