The secret signature of my soul

Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop, or the clap clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt, you would say, "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

--The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis

Have you experienced this? This sense that you were made for something more, a deeper longing for something greater that even you can't define? Does it feel like what C.S. Lewis describes. . .something just beyond your reach, "promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away as they caught your ear?"

Does it always remain beyond our reach? Or do we choose -- because we are too afraid, or too busy, or too comfortable with our lives as they are -- to not reach out and grasp it?

And if so, is this lack what makes us exist instead of LIVE, settle for functionality instead striving for PASSION and practice religion instead of pursuing a RELATIONSHIP with our Creator.

Is it a fruitless endeavor, at least in this life? Will we go to our deathbeds still longing for something we've never been able to reach? How do we find the "echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself?" And what if we lose the desire altogether?