This question has been tugging at me since I came out of my mother’s womb, I am sure. My high school best friend Lana and I would ponder this while laying on the floor listening to Peter Cetera. No kidding, we were dorks. We both shared this interest, well, along with the rest of mankind.
I had a few mini revelations throughout my post college days that bought me time from answering this incessant question. But those “callings” were short lived and I resume back to the drawing board to really answer the question. I realized that unless I had a true inclination of what my life was about, I would continue with unintentional mistakes and was going to attribute to nothing and float around like a block of styrofoam in the middle of a sea, and it was going to bother me for the rest of my life until I acknowledge my purpose.
Yes, I have one of those hard-driven personality that asks all those heavy questions, a lot. So when I turned 29, with a decade of adulthood in the rearview mirror, the question stared me in the face and I knew that I had to attempt at it one more time, hopefully the answer this time around would carry my time, energy, and effort to the next decade with a softer landing.
I spent my 20’s doing, asking, wondering, seeking bit and pieces of the puzzle. But now that I have a decade of insights and experience under my belt, I imagined my 30’s to be different than my 20’s because “I ain’t getting any younger!” Although that’s not the main reason, aging that is, because I’m quite fine with aging. It’s more of a different kind of thinking: what is the point of life?
Through this process, I envisioned what my legacy would be and what I would want to leave behind. I began to think from the end of my life. I began to think of my life in a very finite term. I began to think more about death. The experience was phenomenon. In my thinking and reflection, I started to understand a spec of what all those wise men of the cosmos (Lao Tzu, Emerson, Thoreau, Plato, Buddha) meant in their words of wisdom. You read these literature and you discuss them in conversations, but until you experience, however slight, you don’t really know what they meant. I didn’t.
For example, the concept of the ego. We are born with a strong sense of attachment to the ego and we live our lives unconsciously defined by and attached to our possessions, both materials, identities, emotions, and ideas, and we constantly struggle to meet expectations, sometimes of others’ and sometimes of our own ego. Then we spend our entire lives chasing what we perceive to be real, not aware that those perceptions are merely distractions. Until we detach ourselves from our ego, we continue to act and react to justify the ego’s manifestation. Personal crisis exists to signal the discrepancies between our intuition and our ego, and alarm our attachment to the latter.
With this kind of thinking, I asked myself what is the point of the time, energy, and effort that are given to me, to be used at my disposal. If all this will be gone when death comes, how can I make the best use of my time, energy, and effort to justify a good and disciplined ego existence? That would determine the purpose of this life and I find myself pursuing for a greater good to define that purpose. I also discovered many more things to be irrelevant, unimportant, and quite silly.
Making the best use of the finite time, energy, and effort also means that I am to be careful of my speech, action, and thought. I would consider the purpose of it so as not to be so careless, as if to just fill up time, expense energy, or throw away effort. This remains to be an ongoing development.
So, in looking forward to 2010, I have a few things to tune up and have developed a map of where I want to drive my time, energy, and effort, all the while keeping my ego in check as I make my way toward the predetermined purpose. That way, when I do look back, I would know that I did the best I could with what I had to produce those predetermined purpose. And when it ends, I would be willing to take a bow and bid adieu, and the next generation would continue their purpose.
In the pursuit of the greater good and predetermined objectives, I suspect that the real purpose is to develop the self nature. Everything else along the way is all just circumstantial.
What say you?
