Living with Purpose

There can be times in life where we find ourselves without a sense of purpose. A life lived without purpose can be a drag, to say the very least.

Illness can appear to steal purpose from us, particularly if we're no longer able to work or participate in other meaningful activities. If you're cooped up in bed or on the couch more often than not, watching TV or surfing the net or reading books, it's easy to feel like your life has lost all sense of purpose.

Perhaps you experienced feeling lost before illness and/or a lack of vitality entered your life. On the contrary, maybe it feels as if your sense of purpose and fulfillment was stripped from you and replaced with a life of dis-ease in one fell swoop. Ka-pow, you ended up with a life that you'd never ever imagined for yourself. Perhaps, a symphony of depression, anxiety, fear, hopelessness *insert other here* arrived with the dis-ease.

What if you could get the sense of purpose back, without having to have your physical health? What if your new your sense of purpose could align with your current life, if it was available to you right here and now?

Who Am I?

How many times in a lifetime will one ask themselves 'Who Am I'? I'd love to present a statistic, but I've arrived empty handed on this one. I'm here with a bunch of questions and some musings.

There's this myth that once you know who you are, life gets easier. The myth purports that being secure in this knowingness means you will know what you want to do in life. The myth mostly goes unspoken, but seems to be somehow perpetuated. The gist of it is this: Step 1- Work out who you are. Step 2- Use this information to work out what you want to/should be doing. Step 3- You've made it and now you can coast through the rest of your life, happy.

You know I truly doubt this is true. The only people I've ever come across who will tell me they know who they are, are clearly speaking from a place of ego or superficiality. Lots of people will confuse who they are with what they do. For example, someone tells you they're a pharmacist. That's what they do to earn a crust, it's not who they are, because if they really were a pharmacist they'd be born one and die the same; it's impossible to be born a pharmacist. Consider that during their lifetime they have a career change and decide to wait tables in Paris, does it make them a Waiter? Non.

I think that people clutch to the idea that they are their profession because it's safe, it gives them a sense of belonging and place. It can also mean that for a while they get to ease off on trying to answer that pesky question of 'Who am I?'.