As promised in my post yesterday, I’m returning to share some thoughts on life purpose. And this isn’t necessarily my life purpose specifically, but life purpose in general.
Several questions come to my mind when I think about life purpose. First, how do any of us know what our life purpose is? Why were we sent here? Why did we end up in the families we joined? How do we even begin to tackle our life purpose?
I think some people are driven by an internal pressure to head in a specific direction. From a young age they are certain what path they wish to follow. But that’s not true for most of us.
The rest of us spend our younger years, at the very least, zig zagging in different educational, work, and career directions until maybe, if we are lucky, we find something that feels right. And then there’s the rest of us who still aren’t sure what we want to be when we grow up.
And yet, career/work isn’t always what our life purpose is about, is it? For all we know, our purpose for joining the swell of humanity was that one person we had a meaningful interaction with when we were 32. Or am I wrong? Could our purpose be as simple as the small exchanges with a few people that made an impact in their lives?
If you disagree with that thought, here’s another question. Do we die once we’ve completed our life purpose? Maybe once a person passes on from their current corporeal state they’ve either checked all the boxes of their life purpose, or it’s never going to happen and their creator has decided they may as well just pack it in.
And if we complete our life purpose at a young age, do we get a new purpose as we continue to mature? Or is the purpose of our continued existence to simply enjoy this world and do as little as possible to harm it and help those we meet along the way. Suddenly life purpose isn’t quite as grand as some people think it is. If so, does that remove the pressure or does it make life seem more pointless?
Ponder these questions over the weekend. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Donna Pilato 
Maybe all the pondering is wasted energy. Maybe the purpose is just to accept we are here, do all the good we can and live life one day at a time
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I think acceptance can lead to complacence. If you stop examining your life you might just miss the point of why we are here. Maybe for some, as I blogged, the purpose happened in one chance encounter. But for others a destiny with a greater impact is just waiting in the wings. If that’s the case for me, I don’t want to have complacently traveled through this life because it’s easier not to think about it.
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You raise such good questions! I agree that life purpose is comprised of what we can contribute to others (in both big and small ways), and perhaps also it’s about the lessons we need to learn while we’re here.
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That adds another interesting perspective – thanks for adding to the discussion!
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