Reinventing yourself at 28

[kanlyven]

A little less than a month ago, I returned to America after spending two and a half months working in South Africa.  It was without a doubt the happiest two and a half months of my life, bar none.  I was immersed in a lifestyle I had thought I’d left far behind me, the constantly questioning curiosity of science.  It had been over half a decade

Comments

[truffula_trees]

Ah, purpose. In high school (and even into college) I was obsessed with discovering my purpose in life. There were so many possibilities, so much potential - I could be a poet, a painter, a pianist, a physicist, a pediatrician. Whatever my purpose was, it had to be something big, something meaningful in the grand scheme of things. After all, if my life didn't actually mean anything, why did I exist?

Existential angst aside, it is easy to fall into the "trap" of daily life - work, sleep, eat, tend to social niceties, repeat ad nauseam. Basically survival with some entertainment thrown in, but lacking in drive and purpose, a "greater goal." I've debated internally quite a bit about that myself. On the one hand, I'm content with my "small" life - working at a place I've loved since I was a child (though current management is killing a lot of the enjoyment), living on my own and able to walk to work, near most of my family - but I feel like I ought to want something more, to have bigger dreams, vaster goals. Perhaps wanting to

[kanlyven]

I think for a while I too was waiting to "discover" a purpose in life, but one of the realizations that I've come to after S.A. is that it's not a matter of discovering what your purpose is, but in choosing and working towards a purpose yourself. For so long I went from one thing to another just because it was there, thinking maybe this time I'll find what I'm looking for, when what I should have been doing was being an active participant in what I was doing, in choosing what I wanted to do, not going along with what was easy or available

[truffula_trees]

I'd have to agree - people often claim they feel "chosen" to follow a certain path in life, but whatever you feel, you actually have to choose to actively work toward that path, whatever it might be. It's terribly easy just to let things happen to you and to go along with it rather than to actively direct your own life. Sometimes there can be joys in what life places in your lap, and sometimes you have to deal with what you've been given even if it's not on the path you wanted. Working toward your goals generally provides the feeling of most satisfaction, however, though goals are often ever-changing, as we human beings are rarely satisfied. (There's a sort of "mostly satisfied" sweet spot that we all want to achieve, however, where we're mostly content but still have room to grow.)