On Purpose

The essential thing about purpose and what makes it so alien to all of us - it is independent of circumstances.

Whoever is in your life right now, whatever you do, wherever you happen to find yourself at the time has nothing to do with it. To think otherwise is like believing the mileage signs on the road accumulate and over time turn into your destination: they are only there to let you know where you are, nothing more.

Your purpose, should you happen to find it, may not be what you wish, or even expect, it may make you sad or angry, but it is the only thing that matters in your life.

People are often surprised to find that they have absolutely no connection to their purpose and are thus reluctant to pursue it out of fear they’re going mad.

Who decides it? If you think it’s you briefly review your life and call me when you’re finished. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter, you know your purpose when you see it and it is one of the few things you don’t doubt.

Sometimes it’s so obscure you don’t have the means to express it. Picture this:

“What are you going to do with your life?”

“Let me show you.”

Dance follows.

“I don’t get it.”

Detailed dance follows.

“Yeah, but where is the plan?”

“But I just showed you it. I conveyed it through eurhythmic dance.”

Thank God I’m a writer! Words sometimes approach real meaning.

Sometimes.

With that in mind I have challenged myself to find words. Not sentences, just the words themselves, in random order: mega-puzzle, layers, folding, concentrations, testing, revelation, shifts, rapture, clarity, synapse, currents, loops, precursor, derivative, sympathetic, local, fractals, scale, timing, constants. My purpose is to make sense of all of this.

Throughout my life I assumed that meaning must fit in the common framework of understanding and by this very definition it can’t defy its rules.

It turns out those rules are at best a subset of broader organizing principles which are difficult if not impossible to understand and at worst an artifact of our reason, meant as a place holder for the real thing so we can function at a basic level. It’s not that these rules we are so sure of are wrong, or useless, they just are not at all what we think.

I spent inordinate amounts of time spinning my wheels and I’m no closer to clarity than I was when I started, but there is something deeper than reason that has finally started to scratch the surface of that which cannot be understood. There is no point in planning your itinerary when you have no idea where you are. This is an exploratory process, not a theoretical one. At least for now.

I did manage to achieve some clarity about where I am:

I am ‘here’.

Of course this concept is not new.