Understanding your life’s purpose
You do not exist to supply a lack.
When seeking to understand the purpose of our lives, we have a tendency to focus on the roles we want to inhabit. Are we to be doctors, lawyers, mechanics, masseuses? Parents, teachers, lovers, partners, friends? Are we intended to write the Next Great American Novel, or lead a social movement, or plant a world-changing permaculture garden?
From these understandings, we are eventually left asking: What is the purpose of our lives if we don’t achieve these goals, or fill these roles? And perhaps the more terrifying question — what would be the purpose of our lives once we do?
I had one of those lightbulb moments last night reading A Course in Miracles that fundamentally shifted my understanding of purpose. For me, and I think for many others, my drive to find and accomplish my destiny and do my sacred work has been caught up in a kind of category mistake about purpose. I’ve been misunderstanding what purpose actually is. The Course beautifully sums up that mistake as the confusion of Creation with Making.
Whether or not you are a theist, you cannot deny that life has been created. I certainly did not say “created by the Abrahamic God” or “created by…” anything at all. To say “Life created itself” is equally as correct. Life exists, and therefore, was and…
