That Sense of Purpose

Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness.  It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.    -Helen Keller

One of the more difficult things that we can do--but by far the most rewarding--is to define our own sense of purpose while we're here on this planet.  We can define it for ourselves, and do our best to accomplish that purpose while we're alive, and it doesn't necessarily take any other input from anyone else for us to do so.

Personally, I've been rather fortunate to have discovered a couple of purposes that I've been able to pursue.  I've been a teacher for most of my life, and that's been a very rewarding purpose for the most part, and I know that it's a purpose that helps me to contribute to the lives of others regularly.  I've also been fortunate enough to be able to write, and I've written an awful lot over the years--and hopefully that, too, has given me the chance to contribute to other people's lives.

One of the most difficult aspects of the quest for purpose is knowing which purpose is actually the right one.  I would have loved to have been a musician, and I did spend some time trying to learn the piano and the guitar.  With both I got to a point at which I could read music and actually play some songs, but I wasn't very good at it at all.  I left both of those pursuits behind because no matter how much I wished that playing music could have been my purpose, it very obviously wasn't.  The same with singing--my voice is not a singer's voice, pure and simple.

And that's okay.  Not everyone is meant to be a singer or a musician.  I tried, and that's enough.

It's also rather difficult to be strong when other people are trying to define our purpose for us.  History is full of lives that were dedicated to certain professions because parents forced children into them--the idea of having a child become a doctor is a famous trope in many novels and films.  The children are forced into a life with a purpose that isn't their own, but rather one that their fathers or mothers chose for them.  That can be a recipe for a very unhappy life, indeed.

What is your major purpose in life?  It may be that you haven't found it yet, and that's okay.  It takes more time for some people to understand and embrace their purpose than for others.  What isn't okay, though, it seems to me, is that we never actually try to find that purpose, that we flow along with life doing things that other people tell us to do rather than finding our own way.  Yes, other people can have wonderful advice, and sometimes their advice to us may be extremely important.  After all, another person observes us and our lives from a different perspective than we see ourselves, and from their more objective perspective, they may see something that we don't (or something about ourselves that we deny, such as having a true gift in some area).  If they see that something, they may be able to point us in a direction that's truly worthwhile for us.

When we do try to define our purpose, though, I believe that it's important that it have two very important elements in it.  First, it must allow us to help other people in their lives, by teaching them or encouraging them or providing them with resources they need or giving them opportunities to grow.  If I make owning a small store my main purpose, I can also have the purpose of providing my employees with opportunities to learn and grow and develop self-confidence, for example.  And another purpose can be to fulfill a true need in my community.  And still another can be to learn as much as I can about business and pass that knowledge on to others.

Having a purpose in life can help us to have a life of purpose.  Many people really don't pursue any purpose at all.  They go to work and do what they need to do in order to get a paycheck.  They come home and sit on the couch watching TV all evening.  They go to bed.  Tomorrow, they get up and do the same thing all over again.  They haven't defined for themselves anything that they truly want to accomplish while they're alive, and that's a shame, for the gift of life that they have isn't being used to better anything or anyone else while they're here--and they're not even making an effort to better themselves.  And the lack of purpose then manifests itself in frustration, anger, hostility, and a host of other traits and issues.

If you define for yourself a purpose in life, you can define for yourself a life well lived rather than a life spent existing.  It really is up to you, though, to figure out just what you love to do, just what you're good at, and just how you can best serve others.  Life will go on without us having a purpose, but finding and pursuing a worthy purpose will get us into the mainstream of a happy and healthy and fulfilling life.


No one can tell you how to find your purpose.  It can only be found, slowly,
in your own dark sky, in whatever is sacred to you, be that church or woods.
It can't be found by searching around for a role model or learning how cultural
heroes handled their difficulties.  It is seldom found by following anyone
else's rules.  It lives in the rest in the place where music is born, the fertile
void, the silence between notes.  It is simple and basic.  It emerges slowly
as a sunrise, as we search through our gifts, our darkness, our losses and loves.
Your job and mine is to be quiet and alone from time to time.  To be present to
ourselves and the natural world, and to be in conversation with what is hidden
in us in such a way that we can explore what brings us more alive.   -Dawna Markova