What's Your Life Purpose?
I met someone for the first time the other day and we had a gainful discussion for a couple of hours. Toward the end of our conversation I asked him what he thought his purpose was? Why is he here? He provided a thoughtful response about love and connection and growth. He said he wants to learn, and that he has a voracious appetite for learning.
He then asked: “What about you?” I responded with something like this: Healing and transformation, for myself and others. I aim to clear the clutter from my life and resolve old patterns to be my true self, representing my true divine nature. I want to fullfill all of my objectives for this lifetime so I don’t need to come back and do it again. It is my intention to evolve and grow with every life experience, drawing closer to Ascension—returning to and being one with Source once I leave the earthen plain.
I don’t often ask others about their purpose, because I have found most people don’t know, or at least they conclude they don’t know why they are here. When I do ask about life purpose and I receive a blank stare, I direct the person I am speaking with to look back over their lives. I ask, what have you been doing and what are you drawn to again and again? What have you spent your time and energy focused on over the long years of your life? What is it that makes you come alive?
It seems that many people are adrift, floating directionless through the seasons of life, only hoping to make it through each day. And then they get up the next day to do it all over again.
Humans may have limited themselves to survival, or the next pleasure to ease the mind, make them feel good, or distract. We have become preoccupied with our careers and our relationships and the endless tasks that are constantly before us. These actions may be very close to discovering life purpose, yet I would like to take a closer look to be certain you have the direction you need.
What if I said your purpose is beyond your job and much of what you do each day? What if it is not about your accomplishments that you have been driven so diligently to achieve? What if it I said it has more to do with what you leave behind, the impact and imprint that is discovered after you leave the body. This is what becomes more clear at the end of your life, when you are gone?
Your purpose may have more to do with what you say at the end of life as you are dying. Bronnie Ware, a hospice nurse working in palliative care, wrote a book based on her encounters with the dying. In her book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying – A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing, she offered the following five regrets:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me, leaving my dreams unfulfilled.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard because I missed out on so many important moments.
3. I wish I had the courage to express my true feelings and not settle for mediocrity, but be who I was really meant to be.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends instead of letting people slip away.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier, laugh more and be silly, because happiness is a choice that I didn’t always choose.
Living your life purpose may be flipping those five regrets around and living the life you want. Why wait until your final moments to ponder the greater meaning of life?You can start now.
Life purpose may be found in the hardest thing you ever experienced and how you negotiated a way through it. What if your purpose was to be a survivor and victor in any life situation, and not a victim? What if you came here to go through a very difficult challenge or to be in a very trying relationship, and then to proceed through it with some measure of skill and tenacity?
Or even if you didn’t get through it with sufficient resolution, you just held on without becoming too tattered? But even when you became tattered and broken, you picked yourself up and began to sense a movement, ever so slight, towards wholeness.
What if you came here to grow and what you have gone through that you conclude was a mistake, or the choices you made you thought were wrong, are the precise ingredients meant for your development? What if there are no mistakes, only lessons, and lessons are repeated until they are resolved, and you came here to resolve your lessons?
For me, what I said above about my purpose, could not have happened unless I moved through very difficult challenges. I wanted nothing other to be a good parent and husband, yet I have made mistakes, I wasn’t perfect, I hurt others, and I have witnessed illness in all three of my sons. Additionally, one of my sons passed away and I am left with the anguishing ache of missing him every day.
From this, I have learned that there are things beyond my control and I cannot do anything about it, except to respond well to this life I am living. As I surrender to the process, something carves a deeper way in me as old energies vanish, enabling an apparently unsolicited newness to emerge in its place.
I have accepted life as it is, not as I would have it, and I have allowed the events of my life to unfold with an acknowledgment that something greater is coming. The phoenix must, will, rise from the ashes. Then I find all that I went through was very purposeful, and I can be who I was meant to be as I represent my life purpose.
I would say your life purpose consists of the following:
It has nothing to do with others, it’s personal and inward, yet it likely results in serving others.
The catalyst may be on the outside, yet the effects, the transformation, are on the inside.
Your purpose and design is something that endures beyond this lifetime, and may only be seen after your current life is over.
And, you don’t need to know precisely what your purpose is, yet you are to remain alert and aware—present—remaining in this moment as much as you are able.
This allows something to unfold that perhaps you were not cognizant of in any previous moment. The spectacular occurs, in the context of the ordinary, yet you may not have had any idea about it and are unaware of how this was all planned out.
And this, is your life purpose, to move through the obstacles, even when it is painful and seems impossible. Yet you get through it, somehow, and you are a bigger person because of it. Then you do stuff, meaningful acts of charity, serving others, loving.
This is your life purpose. Live it well.