Purpose.
I think one of the biggest questions that has weighed on me is the topic of purpose. Someone today at work was discussing it with me while I sat for my lunch break.
I chose to take my lunch out in the city and enjoy the calming effect of the air. The noise of the city – cars, people, construction – was all drowned out to me. The ethereal state of people is just reflected in what everyone is doing. A woman calling her friend, concerned about her daughter’s increasing medication needs. Someone else was sitting down on the park bench, head slumped back at an angle that could not possibly have been comfortable for human anatomy. I suppose the question of purpose weighed on me during my walk. A small corner restaurant caught my attention and reminded me of what I was actually here for, disregarding the question and burying it deep in the recesses of my mind.
I swung open the door and meandered inside, trying to glance at the menu handwritten on a chalkboard above the cashier while others ordered ahead of me so I could decipher what I wanted. I greeted the young cashier, a gaunt teenager maybe sixteen or so, and put it in my order. He tapped a few screens of the tablet in front of him, and the card reader slowly rendered to life with the instructions to pay.
Sitting down at a small booth and enjoying my meal and a break from my office, I saw someone sitting alone and asked to sit and talk with him. I introduced myself and told him where I worked, and he agreed to let me enjoy his company for my break. Amidst the typical chit-chat that’s awkwardly worked out when you first meet someone, I decided to ask him the question: “What do you think the purpose is? Is it universal, or something truly individual?”
He kindly (not so kindly) asked me to move tables.
After finishing my meal rather quickly (I kept accidentally making eye contact with him and as a result, wished I could teleport myself anywhere else but there), I departed from the corner and walked back to my office.
While walking, I kept my observations up. I always appreciated people, the things we all do, the struggles bubbling just beneath the surface, the kind of inflection you can only see in someone’s eyes. The knowledge that sometimes, no matter how hard you hide it, it’s just there. I wonder if humans have that inflection as an evolutionary mechanism. The knowledge somewhere in our psyche that no matter how hard we try, sometimes opening up is hard, and we need that small push – just one soul in a vast ocean of them – something that asks us to open up.
While I observed this smaller, I don’t know, lake of eyes? It isn’t exactly the biggest city known to man. Anyway, when I observed these eyes, something sort of clicked in me, like two gears finally clicking into place in an assembly line. Purpose is everything and nothing. It is what drives some of us, our only reason to live – revenge, success, greed, fame, love, anything. For others, it is an afterthought. You only live to survive, you live to work, or you live to get going someplace else. Purpose is precisely what we make of it.
We have the ability to weather the impossible. Every day, someone gets news that breaks them. It disassembles them, piece by piece until nothing remains. And that “thing” always manages to make sure it is as painful and excruciating as possible like thousands of needles piercing the skin all at once across every inch. It isn’t a quick and swift end, it is the most difficult and unbearable kind of one – the one where you feel that spark die, two fingers pinching together and suffocating the light of a candle.
But it doesn’t end us, does it? It might be for some, and we cannot change that course. However, it can harden us, it can break us, can weather us, it can even pass us by. But: we push on.
I think the hardest thing to accept about purpose is that it changes. It’s fluid, flexible to time, ourselves, and who we desire to be. That scares me. But it also excites me.
I cannot wait to see what the future has in hold for my purpose, James.
