purpose
Purpose.
We all search for it in our daily lives. We all strive to have a reason for what we have done or what we will do. Some of us fight for it, some of us just let it happen. Some of us create our own purpose and some of us just lie to ourselves about what our purpose is.
For me, I have discovered that my purpose is to just be. To exist. Take whatever I can from each day and build on it. Take something as seemingly meaningless as a game of Battleship and turn it into a moment that will remain in my mind forever. Also lately though, it seems like I’m building dreams in the sand and letting the waves wash them away.
Every time I think I have something, anything figured out, it seems that I’m wrong about it. I try to be the best person I can be and it breaks my mind and my soul when I can’t fulfill what I think I should do or what I could do. I look at the changes in my life over the last few years and I realize that this is what it’s all about. Change itself.
There’s no comfort in that thought for many people, but I like to think I revel in it. I look at change and see new opportunity. Opportunity for good and bad. Because you cannot have light without darkness. It just doesn’t work that way.
I take these small moments in life and I cherish them. I lock them away in my mind for a time when things get rougher than I’d like. The beauty of these moments pull me up from the mud and muck and give me a renewed hope that tomorrow will bring a new experience that will be better than anything I could have ever hoped for.
I look around myself and I see all the things I don’t like about myself, but I also see the things that I do like. Without a lie to myself, I can say that I am a pretty good person. I know I’m no saint, but I’m also no demon. I am just a man. I cannot hope to fathom the world around me and the complexities that life has brought to me.
I cannot explain how many times in my life that confusion has filled me far more than understanding. Simple things like, “why don’t I visit with people that I care about more?” or “why haven’t I really done anything useful lately?” wrack my brain. Complex things too, though run their course in my mind. Things like, “why can’t good people get more of what they want out of life?” or “why are human emotions so powerful that they can complete us or destroy us?” or even “what is the reason behind a certain set of events unfolding in a particular way that makes me so powerless to change the course of those events?”
I will mention here that I loathe the feeling of powerlessness. I also very strongly dislike the feeling that I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ll be thirty-one years old this month and I feel like I’ve done nothing for all these years. Even though I know I have done so much in my life, I still feel like my purpose is so very weak. To list all the accomplishments I have had would take more time than I care to take at the moment, but still, I feel like there is nothing there. An emptiness when I look around at night in my mind as I try to drift off to sleep. I don’t get to spend my moments before drifting off remembering what a glorious day I had. I spend those last moments wondering what else I could possibly have done to have made today better.
There are days when I smile at that time, however, because I know that I am happy with the way the day traversed. My sense of accomplishment on those days needs no boost. But lately, more often than not, I have felt more on the side of sorrow than on the side of joy. With all the wonder and beauty and life around me, I still feel like I have a hole in me. I’ve tried looking at the people around me and analyzing their lives to see if I can see that same hole or see where that hole might have been in them and what they filled it with. What I see in others is something I already have. I see the holes filled by others. Friends, family, random passers-by, but people.
I thought, for a long time, that what I was missing was “the dream”. You know, a wife, maybe kids, a cat, a dog, a little house in the country with a white picket fence. The dream. I thought that maybe what was making me feel like I was missing out was that I was missing out. My problem was that I didn’t really know what I was missing out on.
My friends have all started getting married and/or having kids, though some still struggle with that aspect of their lives as well. My brothers and sisters all have their own aspects of life that if I could somehow clone and bring together into my life I’d have a grandiose and spectacular quality of life.
My dreams are still big, but they aren’t unreasonable anymore. I don’t have dreams like I did when I was a child. Dreams of building a rocket or a jet pack or being able to talk to animals or discovering life on other planets or being the first person to figure out how to walk on air and be able to teach it to others were fairly commonplace kind of dreams when I was young. Now, my dreams include being able to pay all my bills off and being able to afford my own home and travel and not worry about money and be in good shape and never have anything go wrong ever and always knowing the right thing to say or do. But life just isn’t like that anymore. I can’t just waltz along dreaming of what game to play next or how to fly or live and enjoy every moment of every day because nothing could ever go wrong. I am not Peter or any of the other Lost Boys. I am not immortal. I am not a god, not a demigod, not a saint, not a warrior, not the boss and not really even in control. Most days I wonder if I ever was even relatively in control.
It’s a long and sorrowful road that I have walked these many nights in my mind. I look back at the paths I have taken and so many of them are filled with life and wonderment and happiness and light, but where I am currently seems so dark and quiet and even sometimes angry. What pushes me to continue on this path, I don’t know. Perhaps I have found other lost souls along this path and I am trying to bring them to the light and joy of some of the paths I’ve already been down. Perhaps that sounds a bit more religious than I meant it to, but really, the message is the same. I want to help everyone so much and as much as I enjoy a challenge, I hate the feeling of not having any power what-so-ever. With some new challenges that have arisen, I am finding the struggle just to keep myself afloat is increasingly difficult, but with each passing day there is a chance for a new beginning within and it makes me really wonder how much I am allowing to drag me down or even who I am allowing to drag me down. I don’t want to cut loose and start anew unless it is absolutely necessary, but how far is too far? Who, what and where do I start the cutting loose at?
I am trying so hard to be a good person, but life just keeps throwing this wrench in my gears and causing me turmoil.
I have always thought of writing as an outlet when I was feeling bad. A way of pushing out the negativity and breaking through all the sorrow and the suffering and the torment I was feeling inside. But I wonder now why it has been that way with me. So many times I have written while I felt low and sometimes the writing has been amazing and intense and, dare I say it, even beautiful, but it is not beautiful to feel like this. I do not enjoy the pain that I feel in times like these. I do not enjoy seeing people that I care about in times like these either. I think that is why I have always been a jokester. If I can make them laugh, I can make them feel better about life and about who they are and about everything. But the sad part is, half the time, the jokes are to make me feel better, not them.
I cannot hope to be anything more than I am, but I cannot imagine being anything less. The thought of being less devastates me. Devastates me completely. Perhaps it is just that feeling of starting to get older (though I am a long ways from “old”) that is pushing itself forward and making me start to think mortal thoughts, but often times in my spare time now I think about what I am going to be leaving behind. Will there be any legacy at all? A thousand years from now, will someone read this aloud before their class and say, “that was something my ancestor wrote” and people will say “wow, that was great. Thank you for sharing.” And life will be a little better for little Timmy because he had something typed out in 2009 and it’s now a piece of history?
Will the pictures I’ve taken ever be more than just pictures? Sure, my pictures hang on the walls of at least three countries and about eight states, but does that mean anything? If I came across an original painting by VanGogh at a yard sale that was a perfect portraiture of his neighbor and maybe he had forgotten to sign it, would I even think twice about it? No, because a painting of a random person has no meaning to me. Likewise, I may have a great picture of a friend of mine and long after I am dead, someone will find that picture and unless they had some reason to like that picture, they’d just toss it out and it wouldn’t matter. But for me, that picture was a great moment in my life that I captured on film.
I kind of hope that if there is an afterlife, we aren’t able to look down on the world and see what we left behind slowly be destroyed by people, time and the elements. I don’t want to know that all the things I’ve loved in this life are just more things to add to a burn pile or a city dump to the rest of the world.
I don’t really know what I started out writing this trying to accomplish, but I think what I am feeling is actually pretty simple.
I want people to do things in their lives. I’m not talking about living daily life and striving to survive just to have a continuous circle of life. I want people to live. Not just be alive. I want to live and not just be alive. I want people, including myself, to take a chance on life. You may think just going and sitting in the park will mean nothing, but have you tried it lately? If you haven’t, then you don’t actually know for sure.
I’m tired now and I think that I’ve actually “outletted” enough of my icky feelings for the night. I hope that this finds you all in better spirits than I am at the moment. I know tomorrow brings a new day and I’ll probably be fine after a good night’s rest.
For now, just remember this as the most important thing: For once in your life, be alive and not just living. Thank you.
We all search for it in our daily lives. We all strive to have a reason for what we have done or what we will do. Some of us fight for it, some of us just let it happen. Some of us create our own purpose and some of us just lie to ourselves about what our purpose is.
For me, I have discovered that my purpose is to just be. To exist. Take whatever I can from each day and build on it. Take something as seemingly meaningless as a game of Battleship and turn it into a moment that will remain in my mind forever. Also lately though, it seems like I’m building dreams in the sand and letting the waves wash them away.
Every time I think I have something, anything figured out, it seems that I’m wrong about it. I try to be the best person I can be and it breaks my mind and my soul when I can’t fulfill what I think I should do or what I could do. I look at the changes in my life over the last few years and I realize that this is what it’s all about. Change itself.
There’s no comfort in that thought for many people, but I like to think I revel in it. I look at change and see new opportunity. Opportunity for good and bad. Because you cannot have light without darkness. It just doesn’t work that way.
I take these small moments in life and I cherish them. I lock them away in my mind for a time when things get rougher than I’d like. The beauty of these moments pull me up from the mud and muck and give me a renewed hope that tomorrow will bring a new experience that will be better than anything I could have ever hoped for.
I look around myself and I see all the things I don’t like about myself, but I also see the things that I do like. Without a lie to myself, I can say that I am a pretty good person. I know I’m no saint, but I’m also no demon. I am just a man. I cannot hope to fathom the world around me and the complexities that life has brought to me.
I cannot explain how many times in my life that confusion has filled me far more than understanding. Simple things like, “why don’t I visit with people that I care about more?” or “why haven’t I really done anything useful lately?” wrack my brain. Complex things too, though run their course in my mind. Things like, “why can’t good people get more of what they want out of life?” or “why are human emotions so powerful that they can complete us or destroy us?” or even “what is the reason behind a certain set of events unfolding in a particular way that makes me so powerless to change the course of those events?”
I will mention here that I loathe the feeling of powerlessness. I also very strongly dislike the feeling that I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ll be thirty-one years old this month and I feel like I’ve done nothing for all these years. Even though I know I have done so much in my life, I still feel like my purpose is so very weak. To list all the accomplishments I have had would take more time than I care to take at the moment, but still, I feel like there is nothing there. An emptiness when I look around at night in my mind as I try to drift off to sleep. I don’t get to spend my moments before drifting off remembering what a glorious day I had. I spend those last moments wondering what else I could possibly have done to have made today better.
There are days when I smile at that time, however, because I know that I am happy with the way the day traversed. My sense of accomplishment on those days needs no boost. But lately, more often than not, I have felt more on the side of sorrow than on the side of joy. With all the wonder and beauty and life around me, I still feel like I have a hole in me. I’ve tried looking at the people around me and analyzing their lives to see if I can see that same hole or see where that hole might have been in them and what they filled it with. What I see in others is something I already have. I see the holes filled by others. Friends, family, random passers-by, but people.
I thought, for a long time, that what I was missing was “the dream”. You know, a wife, maybe kids, a cat, a dog, a little house in the country with a white picket fence. The dream. I thought that maybe what was making me feel like I was missing out was that I was missing out. My problem was that I didn’t really know what I was missing out on.
My friends have all started getting married and/or having kids, though some still struggle with that aspect of their lives as well. My brothers and sisters all have their own aspects of life that if I could somehow clone and bring together into my life I’d have a grandiose and spectacular quality of life.
My dreams are still big, but they aren’t unreasonable anymore. I don’t have dreams like I did when I was a child. Dreams of building a rocket or a jet pack or being able to talk to animals or discovering life on other planets or being the first person to figure out how to walk on air and be able to teach it to others were fairly commonplace kind of dreams when I was young. Now, my dreams include being able to pay all my bills off and being able to afford my own home and travel and not worry about money and be in good shape and never have anything go wrong ever and always knowing the right thing to say or do. But life just isn’t like that anymore. I can’t just waltz along dreaming of what game to play next or how to fly or live and enjoy every moment of every day because nothing could ever go wrong. I am not Peter or any of the other Lost Boys. I am not immortal. I am not a god, not a demigod, not a saint, not a warrior, not the boss and not really even in control. Most days I wonder if I ever was even relatively in control.
It’s a long and sorrowful road that I have walked these many nights in my mind. I look back at the paths I have taken and so many of them are filled with life and wonderment and happiness and light, but where I am currently seems so dark and quiet and even sometimes angry. What pushes me to continue on this path, I don’t know. Perhaps I have found other lost souls along this path and I am trying to bring them to the light and joy of some of the paths I’ve already been down. Perhaps that sounds a bit more religious than I meant it to, but really, the message is the same. I want to help everyone so much and as much as I enjoy a challenge, I hate the feeling of not having any power what-so-ever. With some new challenges that have arisen, I am finding the struggle just to keep myself afloat is increasingly difficult, but with each passing day there is a chance for a new beginning within and it makes me really wonder how much I am allowing to drag me down or even who I am allowing to drag me down. I don’t want to cut loose and start anew unless it is absolutely necessary, but how far is too far? Who, what and where do I start the cutting loose at?
I am trying so hard to be a good person, but life just keeps throwing this wrench in my gears and causing me turmoil.
I have always thought of writing as an outlet when I was feeling bad. A way of pushing out the negativity and breaking through all the sorrow and the suffering and the torment I was feeling inside. But I wonder now why it has been that way with me. So many times I have written while I felt low and sometimes the writing has been amazing and intense and, dare I say it, even beautiful, but it is not beautiful to feel like this. I do not enjoy the pain that I feel in times like these. I do not enjoy seeing people that I care about in times like these either. I think that is why I have always been a jokester. If I can make them laugh, I can make them feel better about life and about who they are and about everything. But the sad part is, half the time, the jokes are to make me feel better, not them.
I cannot hope to be anything more than I am, but I cannot imagine being anything less. The thought of being less devastates me. Devastates me completely. Perhaps it is just that feeling of starting to get older (though I am a long ways from “old”) that is pushing itself forward and making me start to think mortal thoughts, but often times in my spare time now I think about what I am going to be leaving behind. Will there be any legacy at all? A thousand years from now, will someone read this aloud before their class and say, “that was something my ancestor wrote” and people will say “wow, that was great. Thank you for sharing.” And life will be a little better for little Timmy because he had something typed out in 2009 and it’s now a piece of history?
Will the pictures I’ve taken ever be more than just pictures? Sure, my pictures hang on the walls of at least three countries and about eight states, but does that mean anything? If I came across an original painting by VanGogh at a yard sale that was a perfect portraiture of his neighbor and maybe he had forgotten to sign it, would I even think twice about it? No, because a painting of a random person has no meaning to me. Likewise, I may have a great picture of a friend of mine and long after I am dead, someone will find that picture and unless they had some reason to like that picture, they’d just toss it out and it wouldn’t matter. But for me, that picture was a great moment in my life that I captured on film.
I kind of hope that if there is an afterlife, we aren’t able to look down on the world and see what we left behind slowly be destroyed by people, time and the elements. I don’t want to know that all the things I’ve loved in this life are just more things to add to a burn pile or a city dump to the rest of the world.
I don’t really know what I started out writing this trying to accomplish, but I think what I am feeling is actually pretty simple.
I want people to do things in their lives. I’m not talking about living daily life and striving to survive just to have a continuous circle of life. I want people to live. Not just be alive. I want to live and not just be alive. I want people, including myself, to take a chance on life. You may think just going and sitting in the park will mean nothing, but have you tried it lately? If you haven’t, then you don’t actually know for sure.
I’m tired now and I think that I’ve actually “outletted” enough of my icky feelings for the night. I hope that this finds you all in better spirits than I am at the moment. I know tomorrow brings a new day and I’ll probably be fine after a good night’s rest.
For now, just remember this as the most important thing: For once in your life, be alive and not just living. Thank you.