There Are No Words: 2016.08.29
Purpose
Estimated Energy Budget – 2015:?¢; 2016 – 50¢
10:00AM
I’ve been up for an hour now, and feel relatively good. My legs are tired – no surprise there – but I’m not aching or sore or anything like that.
Kathleen has been looking at potential pets, starting with a llama or alpaca, through emus and pigs. I taunted her with this picture yesterday. She proceeded to send me a bunch of listings for pigs and other critters as pets. I sent her a link to a dating site and fired up the barbeque.
10:45PM
I’m in bed. Livé’s soccer brought out the worst in me once again. My issues, not hers. She got a golden ball at golf this morning for good listening though, for which I am proud.
Today was not productive in that I had to rest a lot, but that’s ok. I wasn’t surprised, and I did get this post in! At the same time I think my sense of purpose is ailing right now.
Read on.
2015.08.29
11:00AM – There Are No Words, But There Is Something More
My grandfather Inglis, at age 92, lost his driver’s licence. Well, not lost. He said to mom, “I shouldn’t be driving,” and went to get tested. They said, “You’re right, who is driving you home?”
He was devastated. Most of his life had been behind the wheel. Driving was a huge part of his identity and it was gone. It didn’t matter that he’d been a driver for longer than most people live, or that he had given up his licence because it was the right thing to do. It was gone and he lost much of himself.
In first year university, for the first time in my life, I found myself unable to do the work. My sense of self and my performance in school were essentially the same thing, so when one went away, so did the other. It was a dark time.
Looking back now I see the parallels I didn’t see then. Intellectually, I knew that tying my sense of self to something I could do was a trap. Viscerally, I still did it, and paid for it.
Over many years I have internalized the lesson that “I am more than what I do.” It became a part of my attitude toward life: I took risks at work that others would not because I was more than the job; I bounced back from setbacks because I was more than that task.
About an hour ago I realized something for the first time: ‘being more that what I do’ is just another way to say ‘I have a purpose.’ My voice is torn from my flesh but I am more than my voice.
What is cancer compared to that?
Right now I don’t really have a clear purpose,and I find that daunting, I also know that it is the opposite of useful to wait for purpose to happen. Go do something and find purpose it it! It is just that some days that is harder than other says.
Go look at the pigs again. They’re very cute.
