A Purpose in Life

I grew up in a low income housing project.

Life was not easy. My mom was divorced and I saw my father for only a few years before he disappeared. Like I said, life was not easy.

The sense of purpose I had was to just survive. I did graduate high school, thanks totally to my mom’s insistence. I was born an artist. I was able to draw and paint from an early age and that probably saved me from all kinds of terror from the kids I associated with. Much of my life revolved on being an artist, at least in my head. I spent much of my young work life in factories and warehouses. Not the life of an artist. But the family (and I) had to eat.

I was seen by my family as a wandering and lost soul. No focus, no career goals. After graduating high school I was talked into joining the U.S. Air Force. This was my first real opportunity at a career. But not as an artist, even though the recruiter promised I would work in the Air Force Art Department.

I spent one month in the service. After receiving an injection during a medical appointment with the other recruits, I became violently ill for three days. I was then systematically released from my contract with Uncle Sam and returned home to more factory and warehouse work.

My sense of purpose was at an all-time low.  While in high school I taught myself how to play a drum set. I played in a few bands and always had the drums as a source of therapy and escape. I knew that being an artist or a drummer was not a great way of making money. And it was difficult to choose which was more important. Later I would realize both had their special places in my life.

Life took on a new sense of purpose after I married a girl I had tried to start a band with. But I still was working different low-end jobs to pay bills. It wasn’t until after I made a royal mess of my marriage and ended up in divorce, that I found psychology and ended up graduating with a Master’s in the field. Life was looking rosy. I felt as I had found my sense of purpose. This lasted for over 20 years and still is a larger focus in my life.

But something changed recently. My health took a huge hit with a diagnosis of Lyme disease and finding that I could not keep a job for more than one year. I needed help and I needed to re-evaluate myself and my purpose in life.

Finding my creativity again through writing and psychology, and creating a way to offer it to the world has become my purpose.

So, what is our life’s purpose? We have these moments in our lives where we get the chance to reinvent ourselves. Most of us push that moment aside and trudge on with our status quo, never really happy, never dissatisfied enough to do anything about it.

Here in lies the truth to the question “What is my Purpose in Life?” We exist for an indeterminate period of time on this planet. During that time we engage in life. Some of the stuff we engage in is very important, like developing relationships, raising children. Some of them are unimportant, like going to a job we terribly despise, or watching the latest sitcoms. Then there are important times that give our lives meaning and happiness. The unimportant stuff basically just kills time.

So when we say, “What is my purpose in life?” what we are actually asking is: “What can I do with my time here to make it important, to make it mean something?”

The most common question I get from clients is: “what they should do with my life, what is my life purpose.” This is an impossible question to answer. I usually begin asking a lot of questions and in the end they usually find their own answers.

I have put together a series of questions I have used in counseling to help you figure out, for yourself, what is important to you and what can create a deeper meaning in your life.

1. What kind of sacrifice are you willing to make to follow through and achieve your goal?

If you want to be an entrepreneur, but you have trouble handling failure, then you’re not going to make it very far. If you want to be a professional artist or musician, but you aren’t willing to see your work rejected thousands of times, then you are finished before you really begin.

2. What inner secret goal have you harbored for years or even decades that you keep telling yourself “I’ll start it next week, next year, etc”?

We all have that dream. Maybe it was fostered in childhood. Maybe it came out of an adolescent dream while smoking some weed at a friend’s house. How many of those dreams did you pursue? How many did you give up on before they even left your head?

3. How are you with making a complete and utter fool of yourself?

Before you are ever good at something,, you must first suck at something. This is quite obvious, correct? So, to be really bad at something and have no clue as to what you are doing, you must embarrass yourself, and repeatedly. Most of us try to avoid embarrassing ourselves, namely because our fragile egos can’t handle it. So, embrace your embarrassment. Laugh at yourself! Feeling completely foolish is part of the path to achieving something important and something more meaningful. The more a major life change or decision frightens you; chances are, the more you need to be experiencing it.

4. If you had to leave your house all day, every single day, where would you go, and how would you spend your time?

Complacency is our enemy. We get stuck in our daily routines. We find or create distractions. The couch has that comfortable sweet spot. The Corona is cold and the chips are salty. And the same old, same old.

This is indeed, a quite dilemma.

What most of us do not understand is that our passions in life are a result of our direct action, not the cause of it.

Discover what you’re passionate about in life and what matters to you; it is a long trial-and-error process. We do not know exactly how we feel about an activity until we actually experience and put some effort into it.

So ask yourself, if you to leave your house every day, how would you choose to spend your time?

5. How do you want your children to describe you when they talk to their grandchildren?

Can you describe what your legacy will be? What are the stories about you your children are going to tell their kids and grandkids when you’re gone? Is there anything of substance for them to say at all about you? If not, what would you like them to say? How can you start writing your story today?

When we feel like we have no sense of direction, no purpose in our lives, it’s because we do not know what’s important to us, and we haven’t identified our values.

Discovering our purpose in life is essentially finding those one or two things in life that are larger than ourselves.

To find them we must get off our respective couches and take the time to think beyond ourselves, to think beyond our personal needs for comfort and immediate happiness, and ironically, to imagine a world beyond ourselves.