Dad was fiddling with tiles on the roof. He wanted to surprise my Mum by repairing the gutter while we were all away. Summer’s warm rays oozed over golden Cotswold hills, while the breeze carried the birds’ distant melody beyond the roof-tiles like swirling sycamore seeds. Idyllic.

Then his ladder crashed to the ground.

And there was no one home.

These days we often talk about mindfulness. But we don’t talk about being fully engaged in life.

Like being stuck on a roof, being fully engaged doesn’t come with instructions. It can’t because it’s the impetus to look freshly at our lives, to explore concepts we take for granted, and to breathe in air there.

In situations that can’t be neatly packaged, commodified or programmed, we can’t lean on easy guidance.

Life is one of those situations.

The simple answer obstructs the open question. The convenient answer is the enemy of truth.

We cannot hand our questions to others if we hope to receive answers to them. Even the idea that we have to find our own path becomes dogma when we accept it freely.

In truth, there is no hallowed answer that others can pass on to us; instead, there’s a sacred question and we answer by how we meet our lives.

Thorough commitment is the close cousin of fully engaging.

Committed, we don’t place our trust in the stories of others. We know we’re on our own track, and respect it.

We do not overly regard the stories told by the majority – the culture – nor those told at the fringes. We know we have to find our own meaning and commit to our own path.

I never really knew my Granddad. A few years after I was born, Parkinson’s twisted his body, and he left this round while I was still figuring out why he ate food through a straw.

As a child, my Granddad used to throw stones at coal-clothed train-drivers, trudging by soot-dusted tracks in Liverpool; the drivers threw coal back at him, which he took for the fire at home to keep his family warm. I used to laugh when I heard this story, but now I wonder: was that wit or wisdom?

The meanings in our lives are in part constructed. We bring them to life as we eke out our own existence. To form meaning we immerse in the questions our lives bring to us, because it’s there that we have choices. Not in the stories of wider culture or in other stories we accept without thinking.

So the universe is not one and prayer and meditation are not the answer to all sins. Why? Because adopting a series of beliefs does not save us from our lives, and a pretension in the truth of stories is just that.

The nature of mind may be infinite, but it doesn’t reveal itself through a 40 minute podcast. Ripe oranges taste delightful; paying attention when we bite into a juice-crammed morsel evokes shocking sensory delight. But if we believe that that’s sufficient to find truth, we’ve trapped ourselves in a gilded cage.

Questions come to us in search of meaningful answers. When we fail to attend to them – when we don’t explore them – we surrender our own imagination to other people.

When we hold fast to another’s meaning, we are not heeding the wisdom taught to us through our own lives.

Listening to another instead of attending to the questions that bubble up in our hearts is no freedom. And release through the words of others is no release: indeed, it is not possible.

The world is wild. Questions that sit neatly articulated in books are not the ones that move us to new vistas. Our own wild hearts – our own unreasonable questioning and exploring – bring us to the threshold where new ways of meeting life become possible.

Aged 11 I had a date with a plastic Wendy-house pole. As it tore through my eyeball – slicing through the lids – questions burst inside me. At that moment, I was thoroughly committed, fully engaged. In the months after the accident, another eye opened.

It was the deepest spiritual moment of my life.

But I wasn’t sitting on a meditation cushion.

In the fullness of our lives we encounter pain and confusion.

At these moments, we bring ourselves to bear on the questions that emerge from the pain – we meet our confusion honestly.

Other people offer solace amid our questions. Kind others comfort us and show us how they freed themselves. Wise elders show through their example what is possible. But this is not their life.

Like my Dad and my Granddad, genuine seekers are hands-on. Not content with the surface texture presented to them by others, they meet their lives head-on. When they hear the Zen koan about stepping off the one hundred foot pole, they order the wood.

Your life is singular.

Its narrative, its web and weave, its fortune and loss – all singular and own. You are the texture of your life, but you are more than this insular island you call yourself, here in the midst of life.

You are a fullness unknown to yourself. So don’t hand the keys to the mystery to other people. Don’t shirk from the duty to know yourself in your own ground. Thoroughly commit and fully engage. You owe it to yourself, however you find it, and you owe it to us.