Today, I want to write about purpose. Life purpose. My purpose, and yours, and everyone else’s.
Life purpose? you ask, eyebrows quizzically raised. What, you’re talking about the meaning of life, are you?
The search for meaning – for an answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything – is as old as humanity itself. Our curiosity is insatiable. Why are we here? What’s the point? Does it really matter, on a cosmic scale, if I don’t get up and go to work tomorrow morning?
Is there even a point to asking such an apparently ineffable question?
Existential musings aside, yes, there is a point and yes, there is an answer. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m not about to tell you what the answer is. You see, we all have our own individual answers to that question. Each of us has our own, unique purpose in life. It wouldn’t help you, except in the most general of ways, to know what my purpose is. The question for you is, what is your purpose?
The path of personal development is all about cultivating self-knowledge and developing wisdom. It’s summarised in what I refer to as Life’s Hardest Questions:
Who am I?
What do I want?
How can I get it?
There is a fourth question that I won’t go into here; that’s for later.
Not everyone who sets out on a quest for self-knowledge manages to answer these three questions, but many do. They start by becoming aware that they’re stuck in a life, and a lifestyle, that might look pretty good but that is somehow unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. Something’s missing, but they don’t know what it is.
What’s missing is a fundamental understanding of who they are. That has nothing to do with their name, or where they live, or what they do for a living. It has much more to do with their personal values – the principles and qualities and attributes that govern their choices in life.
When you understand this and you start to get some insight into your own answer to question 1, you progress almost automatically to question 2. So, now that I know who I am, what does that mean in terms of what I want to be, to have, and to do in my life? How do I want to show up in the world and what do I want to do while I’m here? Well, would you look at that! Now we’re talking about your life’s purpose.
The chances are, if you’re prepared to dig deep, work hard and demolish your comfort zone, you’ll probably find your answer to that question. You’ll know who you are, and what you want – what you need – in your life. You’ll also have a few ideas about how you might achieve it. Is that the end of your quest for personal development, then?
No, it isn’t.
Now that you know your purpose, you must take action to move towards it. If you don’t, you’re still stuck, right? So the key is action, movement, looking forward to the challenges that life’s bringing you, tackling them and overcoming them and moving on to the next thing.
While you’re working on that, if you’re awake and aware and paying attention, you’ll be developing wisdom, too. Life teaches us plenty of lessons, and it’s the most painful ones that are the most valuable. “You know that thing you just did?” says Life, as you pick yourself up and dust yourself off after a particularly painful experience. “Don’t do that.”
So you live and you learn and you make your way mindfully towards your life’s purpose. Is that it? Have you cracked the secrets of Life, the Universe and Everything?
Well, no. You’re older and wiser but life still has more to teach you.
Sometimes you’ll find yourself coming to a halt, temporarily stuck. Foresight fails you, and you lose your sense of the way forward. Uh-oh!
Think of your journey through life as being like navigating a maze. Occasionally you take a wrong turn and find yourself in a dead-end, or going round in a circle and coming back to a place you’ve been before. In life, there are plenty of situations that will feel like this.
When you realise what has happened, don’t get frustrated. Don’t feel that you’ve somehow failed. Don’t start to despair or have doubts about who you are.
A time of temporary halt is an excellent opportunity for you to pause, rest, reflect on how you got here, and revisit Life’s Hardest Questions. Ask them again, and be diligent in exploring your answers. That will give you great insights into your true self, and it will clarify your sense of purpose so that you can once again start to move towards it. It’s quite possible that the reason for your halt was that your purpose had changed, so that if you hadn’t stopped you’d have ended up going in the wrong direction. This is another of those valuable life lessons. “Stop!” says Life. “Look where you’re going. Are you sure this is the right way?”
Whatever your purpose in life may be, you alone are both responsible and accountable for attaining it. No one else can do it for you. Therefore, if you want to live a satisfying, fulfilling and meaningful life, it’s up to you to figure it out and take action to make it so.
“I do what I do because I am who I am.” Be authentically yourself, and let that be your guide to discovering the purpose of your life and to navigating the route you take towards attaining it.
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