Have you ever had the dream where you're falling from such a great height that you're not scared of dying when you land, if only because you can't see the bottom?

That's where I am now.

Forget your life flashing before your eyes. That passed in the first five seconds. You've moved on to the lives that have crossed yours. Not just where they crossed your path though; you can see far beyond that, to the places they went after you, to the lives they touched after you.

You can see the kid down the street who you used to torture by putting rotten eggs in his mailbox staring at himself in the mirror, trying to talk himself out of his own fall.

You see the kid you saved from drowning in the pool at the rich kid's birthday party. He's driving a school bus now, one hundred pounds overweight, wondering why he gets up in the morning. Two years from now though, he'll be seventy-five pounds lighter and married to a beautiful woman who saw him with her heart instead of her eyes.

You see the young woman who isn't much more than a girl in the park you stopped to talk to because you caught the hint of despair in her eye. Her child is dying from an extraordinarily rare and incurable stomach disorder; he hasn't eaten in three months, and only the intravenous fluids he receives every day are keeping him alive. The doctors have told the mother that soon she will have to decide whether and when to stop feeding him. The meager insurance will only cover another three weeks of private hospital care, and in a charity hospital her son's prognosis is bleak at best. When you leave her she thanks you for listening, and you hate yourself for being as helpless as she feels.

Faster than the human mind can register you see the web of your life interwoven with the lives of all those around you, and of all those around those persons, and on and on into an infinite reach of time, space, and spirit. Even threads that at first seem fragile and wispy, as though they would break at the merest breath of wind, prove to be tightly connected to other wispy threads so that together they form a braid here, a knot there, all of it part of this web of humanity.

You realize that the bottom is approaching. Indistinct and blurry, it is nevertheless approaching, and you feel a great sense of trepidation and remorse as it nears. As you brace yourself for the impact, you realize that your descent is slowing dramatically, and you open your eyes to find the web of life spun all around you, catching you in your fall. Completely arrested now, your fall has begun to turn into an ascent as the elasticity of these ethereal strands begins to haul you back to the lofty perch from whence your dream began. The web, you realize, will not take you all the way back there; for some effort must be left to the little spider. But neither do you have to make the climb alone.