What is Your Purpose in Life?
What is My Purpose?
Taking the Road Less Travelled.
Many people live their life without thinking much about it, going along with what everyone else is doing, fitting in, then dying at the end. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with that, to have no purpose in life, though Socrates disagrees.
“The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” Socrates
It can mean a life of dissatisfaction the whole way through, a life lived without purpose or meaning. And perhaps life isn’t ever going to be wholly satisfying. At least at times it won’t. Sometimes we are in survival mode, or fire fighting, or just trying to get through the days. All fine for a while, but if there is no purpose at the end of it, it makes those periods of our life more challenging. We need to find our purpose to experience life more deeply. To live with fulfilment and meaning often requires a more deliberate approach.
I read the book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ by Scott Peck in my twenties. I haven’t looked at it since, but one concept stays with me twenty years on.
We Are What We Do Every Day
What we do each day is our life. Writers are people who write. Artists are people who make art. Complain all day? You’re a complainer. Feel anger all day? That is your life. Make peace all day? (Parents perhaps) You’re a peacemaker. Show compassion? You are compassionate. That is who you are in all those moments. Critical or judgemental more often than not? Then you are critical or judgemental.
Work all day with no room for anything else? Own it, it’s your choice, or change it. Mean to your partner all the time? That’s you, that is.
We shift through these human things, but if we do too much of one without realising, it becomes us. It is useful to be aware of where you spend too much of your attention, energy, and time and not enough. You can decide who you want to be from now on, and how you spend your time.
By gaining awareness of how we spend life, we gain choice - we can make small significant tweaks to our daily life, sculpting our life closer to being the person we want to be. We can drop what we don’t want and expand what we do.
Devotion to Your Purpose in Life
Devote yourself to your one and only life, and its purpose. Many people allow their lives to slip by with little thought of its purpose. We are not born with a purpose, we must create it. Having purpose is like holding a compass. We may have to walk around mountains and seas, but we can head in the direction the arrow points. Without purpose, we can feel so lost that we can develop mental health problems that stem from meaninglessness, including anxiety and depression.
I sometimes ask clients to imagine themselves in the future, on their deathbed. I ask how they feel as they look back on the life they lead.
Erik Erikson described the seven stages of man, which outlines the stages of life we all go through either successfully or less so. Most developmental stage theories end at the end of childhood, though he takes his all the way through. The final life stage, when we are old, we experience either ‘ego integrity’ or ‘despair’, he says.
We want to look back over our life thinking ‘Yeah, I did my best,’ or ‘wow, I am proud of that!’ Or might we feel despair about how we spent our life? Let’s avoid that.
Finding Direction in Life
Peck advises to decide what the number one most important thing is to you in your life going forwards. This is your purpose.
My Purpose in Life
Take a moment to decide your purpose right now. Slow down, breathe and take some time. What matters most to you? What, and who, is most meaningful to your life? Finding your purpose leads to satisfaction for yourself even through the harder times. Because you matter, when you find your purpose it is easier to give some of your beautiful energy back to the world. We need you!
For exercises and ten therapeutic journaling prompts to help you get there head over to the Therapy Toolbox Course. Become… you!
Kate x
