What’s your purpose?
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Do you feel a growing itch to discover your purpose, or perhaps uncover the elusive meaning of life? Please don’t let today’s goal-obsessed, analytical culture confuse you. It’s really quite simple.
Purpose isn’t discovered in your work or through research or psychoanalysis. And purpose isn’t carefully considered and crafted. It emerges. It’s a way of being that grows and evolves.
Purpose isn’t something that we pull out of our ourselves. It’s something we allow to emerge, out of our spirit and values. It’s not something that we uncover. It’s an essence that we reveal through our behaviors.
Purpose is movement towards a more virtuous and authentic way of being. Purpose creates a new world; one that compensates for the one we typically experience. A new world of truth, compassion and excitement.
Purpose is an aspiration. It’s a direction that drives us. It informs our minds and engages our hearts.
Emerson wrote,
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate. To have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
The same is true of you and your life. Are you helpful? Is what you do enjoyable? Does it stir your soul? Are you honest, straightforward and trustworthy? And if you think compassion is a wishy-washy concept, think again. Compassion is the deep awareness of the suffering of another, coupled with the desire to relieve it. And that relationship, with the world and with yourself, is the key to meaning, renewal and growth.
This is not rocket science. Be your purpose. Show people that you really care. Get off of your wheel and actually give a shit. The future is not some place that you are going. It’s a reality that you are creating, right here, right now from your inner voice.
So that is your purpose, and it’s up to you to allow it to emerge. For your co-workers. For your community. For your children. For the Earth. And for your own soul.
The Korean American author and journalist Min Jin Lee has the perfect words to live by:
“Showing up every day and having integrity about the way you live your life: that’s really the magic, because the ending and the beginning and the expectation and the outcome—all that stuff is nonsense. It really is. I know so many people who work really hard and don’t get those things. If you show up every day, keep your word, be somebody who has dignity in the way you comport yourself, that’s quite astonishing.”
Be original and act from your unique spirit. I promise you that you will astonish yourself, and the world.
Stay passionate!
