Purpose

If you were given the exact date of your death, would you live your life differently? Let’s say that the date was 5 years away, 10 years away or 20 years away. What are you doing now that you would not be doing? What would you do differently?

If your answer is that you would live your life differently then, the next question is; why aren’t you doing it now?

I often hear from great people that they do what they do because they have discovered that it is their purpose in life. It leads us to think about what our purpose in life is. Your purpose doesn’t have to be grand, it doesn’t have change the whole world, it only needs to change your world. In changing your world, you change everything that touches it and that has the effect of changing the whole world because we are all interconnected.

This was made so much clearer to me when I heard a reading at a meditation retreat. It had such a huge impact on how I see everything ever since.

The reading was written by Thich Nhat Hanh a Vietnamese born Buddhist monk in his book “The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra.” In the book he ponders when looking deeply into a piece of paper.

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in order to be a tree. Therefore, you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you look more deeply, with the eyes of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of those who are awake, you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here; the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father – everything is in this sheet of paper. “-Thich Nhat Hanh

In going back to your purpose in life, what is most important is that you live your life authentically. Whatever you do, whatever your purpose might be, it changes your world and the world. You do not even have to be able to define what that purpose is. You just need to live an authentic life.

Living an authentic life is one where you can leave feeling as if you have lived it well. This feeling comes from within you, it matters not what you did or did not do.

Your soul knows what that is, are you listening?