The purpose of your life is no less than the purpose of life itself, and the purpose of life itself, is to live.
Your quality of life is determined by how well you can live according to your own uniqueness.
Contained within you is a range of potential. This potential is genomic – in so far as it is held as codes within your genes.
How do you unlock it?
In part this will be as a response to your environment, in part it will be in your attitude to your environment and to your experience of life within it.
Whatever you can perceive and believe, you can achieve. That sort of thing.
Yes, there are limitations, but then there are always limitations. The point is more to do with what the real limitations are, and what are the limitations you have just assumed.
In other words, you don’t know what you can do until you try.
The question is then, what would you like to try in life? What are your potentials, hidden or otherwise?
The Sky’s the Limit
Within reason your potential could be anything.
Before you can know them, you are first faced with the challenge of discovering them, and then, with the challenge of enacting them; of realising them in your life in tangible ways.
If we are to talk about a sense of purpose in life then it will likely be contained within this range of potentials, or realised through them in some way.
As mentioned before, these potentials are genomic; they are encoded in the very structure of your DNA. They find expression as a result of your awareness of them and according to the environments they can be expressed in.
The potential to build a house for example is as much defined by the materials that are available to you as it is to your imagination and skill at building a house. Log cabins are as much the result of tall straight trees as they are anything else. Adobe houses are born of the limitations of the arid landscapes they occupy. Each require different skills too.
Adaptation is a big part of realising your potential then. Your Life Purpose, or rather, the purpose of life as it shows up in you, will be an adaptation of your potential according to the environment you find yourself in – or, another way of looking at it, your ability to adapt to (and to adapt the environment you are in) will inform your potential. If all you have known is the desert it is unlikely that the house you imagine building will be made of the tall trees of the pine forest.
By the same token, if your environment is limiting the expression of your potential then it may be that you need to change the environment you are in – or change yourself in order to adapt to it. If you want to build a log cabin in the forest then you will need to move to a forest.
This is key: Adaptation.
At least that is the theory.
It is one thing to point to a path and to explain the act of walking, it is another to actually travel it.
The Myth of Knowing Your Life Purpose
You are probably aware of people whose purpose in life appears unquestioningly clear. These sorts of people, as children, had mastered the violin by the age of 7 or were studying the nuances of baking ancient Japanese sourdough bread in the mornings before school. O.k. Maybe you didn’t know them, but you know the sorts of people I mean. Or at the very least you have heard stories.
They are not all maestros either. Some of them just want to be mothers, or drive buses – and that is more than enough. Whatever it is they just seem to know why they were put on this earth and they just get on with it.
These people are not to be confused with those souls who have just accepted their lot. It can be easy to confuse the two from the outside. Behind the facade of their persona, one is fulfilled by life and the other is not.
At the more extreme end of this spectrum are those rare individuals for whom exists an unrivalled drive. An intense focus and clarity of vision that seems to propel them through life with such force that the path carved in their passing cannot help but draw attention.
When people generally point to examples of individuals living their life’s purpose these are the ones that are considered exemplary.
For most of us, this passion and drive, this clarity of vision and focus, has not been our experience. Or rather, we may have had glimpses of it in our own lives but the state hasn’t lasted.
For those who feel devoid of this sense of purpose in life – or feeling that they have a specific life purpose but can’t (or haven’t yet to) fulfil it – the absence of this quality of engagement may be frustrating or depressing.
“If only I could wake up with that clarity, that passion, that focus, that vision – then I would feel alive. Then my life would feel purposeful.”
In truth though, it appears that the other way round is equally as valid. That your relationship, to yourself, to others, and the world – to learning how to adapt between the conflicting and comparable elements therein, makes you see your own path more clearly, and that the passion to follow it arises from that.
Your own unique path is just that – your own unique path, it cannot be followed by anyone else. Knowing and then being yourself, and then seeing how life unfolds as a result is the purpose of some peoples life. For them, being present with their being is enough.
When life is about living in a way that leads to feelings of fulfilment, how much more is there?
The Purpose of Life
Actually, I am not really sure I even believe in ‘a’ life purpose anymore – not singularly – not for everyone. Certainly, I can accept that for some people it can look like that from the outside, but to be honest, those people seem few and far between. What seems more valid, and more rewarding, is that living life is experienced as fulfilling, and that does not necessarily have to qualify by a specific endeavour. Rather it is experienced as the result of how you engage with life – not what you do in life, not necessarily.
Back to the point made at the beginning of this article then. Instead of considering the purpose of your life, consider the purpose of life itself, and consider that the purpose of life is life itself; which is no more complex than to live.
As long as you are alive then life is achieving it’s purpose through you.
That still leaves the question;
‘How shall I live in a way that feels good,
in a way that feels fulfilling?’
Mostly, people who are seeking a purpose in life are doing so because they simply do not feel engaged with their current experience of life.
Purpose in this sense might then be seen as synonymous with engagement: A desire to wake up each morning and to leap gleefully from your bed, excited by the prospect of the day that awaits you. A desire to feel motivated and enthusiastic in a way that keeps you focused and engaged.
Let’s assume that this is the experience of life that you are seeking, or something similar.
In my experience, it can be less about seeking your purpose, as such, and more about moving beyond a state of familiarity that can be keeping you from experiencing life more fully. In this sense it is about embracing the unknown and living in the willingness of not knowing, and being willing to find out.
Variety is the Spice of Life
The trouble can be that the range of experience you are having in life has become repetitive – or you are living at a level of comfort that is keeping you stuck in repeating the same experiences. You are choosing comfort and safety, and that is keeping you stuck.
As a consequence your instinctual drive to grow – emotionally, physically, mentally or spiritually – is not being met. As a result life ends up feeling stagnant. You may even have become contemptuous of it, maybe even of yourself.
You may feel stuck, not knowing where to look for something new. Maybe the present and the future feel resolved for you, in so far as everything feels predictable: same shit, different day. As such life has taken on a feeling of inevitability. In this way your predictions are inhibiting the flow of life and, in turn, the flow of your experience of living. As a result you are kept feeling lost, trapped, broken, or stuck.
On and on it goes.
Day,
after day,
after day,
after day.
The chances are, if you are here reading this, then you understand this much already. Maybe this has even been your experience. Maybe it still is. It’s fair to say it might be too.
Maybe you have already tried a host of techniques to shift the affects and the negative emotions that you have been subject to, but without any lasting effect.
Old habits die hard they say.
Conclusion
Breaking familiar cycles can take effort, not least in the courage to confront yourself. It requires that you step into the unknown. At least a lot of the time it requires that you step into the unknown. At the root of it though, is it not just a simple question of being present with the unfolding moment of life as you are experiencing it?
When the unknown feels more threatening than the familiar suffering you know, is it any surprise that you might accept a life of quiet desperation over some anticipated catastrophe that might result from your actions? Of course, imagining a catastrophe is often part of the issue. What you perceive and believe you can achieve. Remember? It works both ways. If you imagine the world is a bad and evil place full of danger then when you meet it, that might just well be what you see.
Of course, the corollary to this is that you are asked to imagine that the world is all roses, kittens, and chocolate eclairs. While some people will recommend this as a strategy to imagine just positive things happening (and it does have some value, I’m not denying it) What seems to be the more balanced approach is to reserve judgement. To hope for the best but to learn from what is. Leave your ideologies and your predictions in a little cart that you drag behind you for reference, rather than as a suit and helmet that you wear to protect you from the world.
To fail and make mistakes is only human. Learning to forgive yourself for bad predictions or assumptions you made in the past – this is a transcendent position. There are many ways to get there, feel free to hit me up for a chat if you want a one to one on the subject. Generally speaking, acting towards a life that is more in line with the truth of what you feel or know yourself to be, this is really enough.
Transcending the limitations and the restrictions imposed in the name of safety or comfort is rarely a bad thing in the long run. Life unfolds in those moments, it may not always be as you imagined, but if you stick to the unfolding edge of the experience and adapt to it with an open heart and mind, well, I don’t know what will happen for you, but I am willing to guess that there is a good chance it will be more fulfilling – or more insightful – or more enlightening – than remaining where you are. I might be wrong. Either way, there is only one person who can find that out, and that person is You.
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