Blog on mind and brain research and advice

Whose Life Purpose Is it, Anyway?

January 3, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

Purpose.com Pumpkinfest (Photo credit: leesean)

Purpose is a term freighted with significance; life purpose even more so. Realizing what our life purpose is—let alone fulfilling it—is so daunting a task that there’s a huge industry out there that wants to help us with it. Because we have to have one, right? If we don’t find it and go after it, life will be empty and our lives will have been wasted. This is tough enough to deal with early on in life, but as we get older it can lead to all kinds of stress and anxiety. If we haven’t found it yet, does that mean we’re failures? Or is there still time to undertake the quest?

Assuming we actually do have a life purpose, why is it so hard to determine what it is for so many people? What’s the big mystery? Whose purpose is it, anyway? If it’s yours, it should not be opaque to you. If it’s part of some universal master plan that requires we race through a series of mazes like rats in order to find the life-purpose cheese, do you really want to play that game? I don’t.

Life mission is another one of those terms, but with a twist that includes coming up with a mission statement for your life. It would be interesting to take a poll to find out how many people have written mission statements for their lives. But I think I already know what the results would be: damn few.

This idea that each of us has a specific life purpose probably derives from humanity’s deep need to understand the much bigger picture: the purpose or meaning of life itself. That isn’t something we can actually know from our particular vantage point, but it’s hard to live with the unknowing. So we search for the meaning of life and try to figure out what our purpose is in having one (a life).

This may seem radical to some, although I know it won’t to others, but if there’s a big-picture purpose to your being alive right now, you probably will never know what it is. If you believe you’ve found it and are living it, congratulations. I mean that sincerely. But if you’re still looking for it, feel free to give up the search. Have a bowl of ice cream. Listen to some music. Call a friend. Enjoy your day.

Creating

December 30, 2012 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Michelangelo is quoted as having said:

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

It’s unlikely anyone reading those words would conclude that Michelangelo meant there is an actual statue that already exists inside each block of stone that anyone who is really looking for it could discover. The statue he would have discovered in a particular block of stone would undoubtedly not be the same statue another sculptor—Rodin, for example—would have discovered in it. Not being a sculptor, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have discovered anything other than more stone inside the block of stone.

Michelangelo, an exceptional artist who created many exquisite works, was describing the way he saw the material he worked with. No one else saw exactly what he saw. No one else created what he created. He didn’t simply hack away at a piece of marble with whatever tool happened to be at hand looking for what he might find inside it. He did what he did with skillfulness, with attention, and with intention. He devoted himself to creating works of art that he wanted to create and that we still want to look upon.

We each have our own set of tools and materials—skills, abilities, talents, inclinations, experiences, passions, and drives—from which to create. We can use them to hack (or chip) away at life or we can use them with skill, with attention, and with intention.

We can either keep searching for a pre-existing statue inside our piece of stone or we can create something from the stone.

What Do You Want?

December 24, 2012 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

If you can rattle off your answer to this question by ticking items off on your fingers, good for you! If your response is a blank stare, however, or a shrug of embarrassment, you’re definitely not alone.

Maybe you believe you should know what you want, and you think there’s something wrong with you if you don’t. Maybe you have a vague idea. Or a mental basket you’ve stuffed full of ideas over the years that’s done nothing but accumulate dust.

Maybe the only thing you’re sure about is what you don’t want.

Or maybe there’s something powerful that’s pulling you in a particular direction, but you need a lot more clarity in order to figure out if that’s where you really want to go.

There are plenty of books and courses out there that begin by claiming you really do know what you want. Do they mean to imply that you’re just being stubborn when you insist that you don’t? There are also a few books aimed at helping you figure out what it is you want and then showing you how to get it.

I won’t say the books and courses in the first category don’t have anything to offer, because many of them do. The problem I found with them is that their starting points were premature. I wasn’t there yet. Sure, there were a lot of things I could do and have thought about doing. But I wanted to dig deeper and do some more exploring first.

Books, courses, and workshops that focus on helping you figure out what you want (or want to do) are generally designed to take everyone through the same series of exercises and processes. I don’t like the one-size-fits-all approach for many reasons, but the biggest one is that most people simply don’t follow through. Maybe the exercises are too daunting. Maybe they simply aren’t appropriate for everyone (or for the stage of life a person is in). Maybe as we get older, we tend to rebel at doing homework. Maybe life gets in the way. Sometimes it’s a combination of all those reasons and more.

The upshot is that there are a lot of good ideas, exercises, processes, books, workshops, and courses that already exist. But a year and a half ago, when I was ripe to engage in the process of figuring out what I wanted to do next, I couldn’t find anything that felt like a good fit. I needed to start from the place where I was at right then and there. So I did, making it up as I went along.

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads.
Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

–Rosalia de Castro, author and poet

Ultimately, not knowing is the very best possible place to start from. So if you don’t know, but you’d like to and you’re curious, then right now you’re in the perfect place.

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