I don’t know about you, but I have practically been running around my entire life, well at least my most self-aware and conscious years, I’m talking about the past 26 years, wondering what my special, unique purpose in life is. Why am I on this planet? What’s my calling? What am I supposed to do with my life? And apart from the occassional excited feeling about “oh hang on, maybe I’ve found it now” only to realize a little while later that “yes interesting but no not calling”, I have been at a loss to explain to anybody why I am around.
I’ve always felt there’s something that I should be doing, striving towards, eventually feeling ultimately fulfilled to do, etc. all that “do-what-you-love” kind of thing. It was a continues search, if I could only find THAT which I’m supposed to do I’d be happy. Needless to say after nearly 43 years on the planet it’s still eluding me. I never found that one thing that I could rightly call my purpose, my calling. And I’ve been hugely jealous of all these wonderful people that are eternally happy doing whatever it is they’re doing, be it teaching pre-school kids the alphabet (that’ll be my child’s teacher) or showing a nation how to live in peace and harmony (that’ll be Nelson Mandela). I always felt, surely there is something out there anywhere along those lines, big or small, anything, that is uniquely me and that is what I must do.
As I fell deeper and deeper into an emotional, financial and not to mention mental abyss – making me understand once and for all what bottomless really means – I was searching more and more feverishly this thing that I should be doing. Because, you know, when I found it, all this turmoil – inner and outer – would go away. Because then I would know what I love doing and then I could just focus on doing that. But it never happened. I never had the AHA-moment which made my entire being realize, yes, that is what you’re supposed to be doing.
I have too many interests. I do. I love so many things, do so many things. It’ll be much easier for me to list all the things I don’t particularly like (that’ll be heavy metal music and an animal’s insides to eat) than all the stuff I love. How could I possibly choose only one thing over all these widely interesting subjects?
Over the last couple of months I heard myself saying many times, if I could just do nothing else but be on this journey, find out who I really am, find out who others really are, concentrate on nothing else but putting together this big puzzle. But now – comes in the Little Voice – you can’t make a living of this, it’s also not really a “purpose” because well it isn’t (notice the blankness here, can’t even define this) and so on. So I kept looking for that special purpose of mine, insisting it’s out there somewhere and I just gotta find it.
Long story short, a friend I hadn’t spoken to in many years and who himself went through a remarkable journey of self-discovery, “suddenly” popped into my life with a message loud and clear: “Your purpose is to awaken. And that’s the only purpose each one of us has.”
That was a bit of a shocker for a moment, but finally after all those years of searching, this felt right with my entire being. Any person that is following their dream and seemingly had found their purpose have simply awaken to that. It’s about the awaking not what lies behind the awaking. So it is after all about the journey. You know it feels silly to write this down because it is so, yeah well, you’ve known this all the time. But the thing is, just knowing about something is very different to actually knowing it. If you only know about it it means you have the information. I had the info that it’s all about the journey, but not the knowledge. Because knowledge is applied information. And I hadn’t applied that information, at least not fully. I did partly, sure. So I had knowledge about it.
But knowing it, fully and utterly, with every cell of my body, knowing what it truly means, what this feels like when you do suddenly only “worry” about the journey, that is entirely different. There’s a difference between setting a goal and striving towards it and worrying about how to achieve it. I’ve learned I have to set a goal and then let go of it, so weird I know, but that is the key. Come back into the NOW and say to myself, ok, so right now, what’s the next step to do in order to achieve that? And then just do that without thinking about the entire goal, the entire complexity or the impossibility, etc.
There is a time to be spent in the past and in the future but the key to successfully – by power of choice – utilize the past and the future is to let them both go and be right here, right now in this very moment.
I am very aware I’m most certainly not the first one to discover this or talk about this, I mean hello, I’ve been reading Eckart Tolle’s “Now” many years ago. But once again, reading a book is knowing something about something, it is not knowing it. Knowing means being – doing – having the subject. It’s not done with reading a book once. Alan C. Walter calls this being a “oncer”.
I find myself still falling back into old habits every now and then, and I guess that’s to be expected when bringing a metaphysical experience into the physical but the bliss I feel since I let go of having to find “the” purpose and instead be/do/have everything I can every day to awake more and more is amazing. Deep, sincere thanks to the hundreds of beings who were directly and indirectly involved in my journey and will be in the future. I received a gift the very day I fully came to understand and know what my journey is and I took a picture of it. The picture doesn’t do it justice at all, in reality this rainbow was incredibly magnificent, utterly transcending, shining with a brilliance I’ve never seen before. It was an amazing moment, now eternally edged into my mind.
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