Purpose

What is purpose? Sometimes I ask myself this question because I would like to get an answer and sometimes it is to understand where it is coming from. But in the end can we ever put it into words? Like I mean a 100% put it into words. Because for me, I have no idea what exactly is my purpose, and usually I have to do something in order to know if it aligns or not. Sometimes I can tell from beforehand, sometimes it just aligns and after awhile it stops, and then sometimes you just feel it deep down and you are not sure what it is. Do you have it too? Or do you just know?

Often when I think of this I think of The Matrix (yes I am a huge Matrix fan), and you know in the second movie, Neo meets with the oracle again and she tells him: ‘You didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it’. And somehow I find this quote so fitting to what I am describing here. We often call it the gut feeling, our instinct. So somehow some part of us already knows what aligns and what does not, yet our conscious part is so oblivious to what we want, what we need. And then the question comes, so if we already know what we are to do and who we are, no matter how deep down this part is, then what we are here to do is to experience life and understand why we are who we are as we make mistakes and make the right decisions. And I find this heavy to accept. But at the same time it makes sense. It also makes sense of the cliche phrase we like to say: The journey is more important than the destination. Because in this case, it seems that the destination is lying right within us, but it seems that it requires the journey to be fully unlocked. I find it a weird thing. Because if we know, shouldn’t we just know? Why do we need to prompt it by existence in order to come about?

This makes me think of another thought dilemma, imagine a woman who is in a room devoid of any color. She has lived in this room in greyscale for all her life. So all she knows is what is in the room and the properties in this room. Once she was reading a book and it mentioned colour. She was immediately hooked by this interesting, yet weird concept. She particularly thought that the colour red is the most captivating of all. So since she was in this room and could do nothing more than research, she researched the hell out of red, she knew every physical property, how it makes the observer feel, all the stories about red, and so on … After a while, a long while she ran out of things to find out about red as she knew everything she could possibly learn about red. And now comes the big question: if she is finally allowed to see red, since she knows every of its physical property, would she learn anything new by experiencing the colour? Tough I know, but I think she would, because by experiencing it, she is making sense out of all the data she has consumed. And by knowing a wavelength of a colour is not the same as knowing yourself how it looks. And I guess the same thing with our lives. Knowing and experiencing are 2 different things.

So when I think about it, I think it is quite sad, because while we are going about our lives, sometimes we are so focused on the things that we are doing, that we forget that we are as well on a bigger journey of our own. And so there are many people who go about life, never figuring this out. And do not get me wrong here, I am one of those, still figuring it all out. But who isn’t?