Importance of Faith in Process

I was reflecting today after meditation how important it is not to see life as a punishment/reward system, but more as a kind of journey where one can look back from a certain vantage point and see why things have happened as they had. This doesn't mean that one should just be unconscious, but on the contrary, it suggests the need to always be alert for how life unfolds and what it might be saying.
   There are two extremes that one can take in this context. One is simply not to care at all, and just see life from moment to moment, under the idea that 'we will die anyway'. Another extreme is to think that everything is terribly 'bad' or portends something ominous, especially when one is disappointed in something. Without a basic trust that life has these self-contained reasons for being as it is, it is sometimes impossible to see how it can possibly be coherent. I think of the example of a tree. When taken as a tiny seed or a branch, the tree might look like an agglomeration of cells, with no particular reason to it. A person might even look at the tree from a vast context of comparing it to the other matter in the universe, then concluding that the tree is really quite finite and might not even have a purpose after all in the grand cosmic scheme. But when taken as a self-contained living being with a particular process of maturity, the tree starts to have its own unique bearing and meaning, which cannot be replicated or imitated by anything else. The tree basically has 'its own reasons' for being what it is, which cannot be repeated by anything else.
   This faith is something that preserves a process of being something in a particular localized way, rather than going the extremes of negation or trying to be 'everything'. Without this faith that all living beings have a unique story and meaning, it is very hard to pursue one's dreams and hopes, because one has either lost hope altogether or gone the other extreme of trying to pursue a higher ideal that is beyond one's lived experience. I would have to say that soul is this middle space where one can see the unfolding meaning in the heartfelt pursuits of daily life.