#39 How to find your life's purpose
#39 How to find your life's purpose
plus: the last link roundup of 2022
Hey friends, comments off on this one since I can’t moderate them, as mentioned last week I’m in silent retreat this week.
This is the first time I’ve missed a family Christmas to specifically and aggressively meditate, and while that’s definitely sad, it’s changed the entire feeling of this month in a tangible way. I’m relaxed, I can breath, I don’t feel like I’m missing out or forgetting something important or not measuring up or like, worrying that my house is decorated worse than Beth’s or something. I asked for no gifts. I gave everyone in my family money. I didn’t buy a tree I’ll bitch and then bitch about the wastefulness, or put up a single decoration. I won’t be attending one party. It’s an actual opt-out, and it’s turned out to be a life improving move.
Something I’ve been thinking about the past few years, since losing what I thought was my “divinely inspired” life’s purpose, is What Now. What’s the point of an existence, of being here at all, if there’s not some really special thing you’re doing that makes meaning out of your taking up space and precious resources. In an interview Emily and I did with Liz Gilbert on our Quitted podcast earlier this year, I was talking about this exact thing, and what Liz said in response was one of the best framings I have ever heard on the subject of “having a Purpose” and probably the best wisdom I came across all year. (If you want to listen to the whole conversation, it’s available here and here in two parts.)
I was in California for speaking and I had some free time in the afternoon. So I went for a walk…and…the key part of this story is that I was free. I had free time. So this never would have happened if I didn't have free time…So I was just wandering around with nothing to do, no purpose…and I looked across the street and I noticed that there was a gentleman standing at the top of a very tall ladder…repainting his sign on his awning of a storefront.
I have really good ladder safety skills because I grew up on a farm with a jackass father who used to do such fucking bullshit with ladders and chainsaws…and his daughters, and…his wife, like it was just such nonsense. And so I like grew up with a mother yelling at me like, oh, hold your father's ladder, you know, so I have this reflex. When I see somebody being reckless on a ladder, I was trained to not let people fall off ladders…So I crossed four lanes of traffic and I held the man's ladder for about half an hour. And…this is the important part: I had nowhere else to be. I had nothing else to do. So I could just sit there for half an hour holding this stranger's ladder. And then when he started to come down…I just gently peeled off and walked away and he never saw me. I never saw his face. He never knew I was there. And as I was walking away I thought what if that was the entire purpose of my life? It's just as good a fucking guest as anything.
We don't know what's going on here. I don't know the master plan. What if the whole reason I was given incarnation was because they needed someone in Sector Seven, Region 14, you know, Avenue, whatever, six 2.0 100 hours to hold this dude's ladder because he was essential to the ongoing evolution of something. And like: I had to grow up on that farm with that jackass misbehaving father and his ladders to be present to that moment, and just hold the ladder. And what if I had served my purpose in that moment? And now I am free? What if everything else I did in my life was just killing time till they need to meet and hold the ladder.
…You can't prove that that wasn't my life's purpose. And because you can't prove that that wasn't my life's purpose, then we should just give up on the whole question of life's purpose. Because it can't be proven. It's just a theory that we all spread to each other like a virus to make each other sick.
So now I'm more in the line of like, do the next right thing. You know just do the next right thing when you see somebody on a ladder that's shaky hold it, there, your work for the day is done. There's garbage on the ground pick it up. A dish needs to be washed, wash it. I don't know. Like that's it. What if that's it? You know?
That is Liz Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love which has sold, I don’t know, a billion copies, that was the catalyst for people like me to leave their jobs and live in Italy and you know, skip Christmas to meditate in a frozen tundra for 40 hours—a person whose “purpose” most of us could guess has been clearly and obviously filled—saying perhaps the whole reason she’s here at all is to hold some guy’s ladder.
I’m leaving this here today, as we move through the remainder of this year and encounter God knows what, with the possibility that the entire reason we are here could be justified through the things we so often deem banal or unimportant within the context of this culture. Holding a ladder. Being kind on the phone to the customer service rep. Buying the guy outside the 7-11 a pack of his favorite cigarettes. Holding a door. Not honking back. De-escalating an aggression instead of returning it. Leaving a tip for a server that seemed intent on ruining your meal. Finding ways to deliver grace or kindness that will absolutely go unnoticed but might possibly shift the course of our entire evolution through events we could not begin to imagine. These examples might be really specific and they are; they’re ones from my own life the past few weeks, things that are both hard in the moment and also things I think of, often enough, as so small compared to what some people do with their lives, like reporting from a war zone or winning a Nobel or whatever. I guess I’m saying: I know that a lot of what I think makes my life important, or will make my life important, is often enough just frivolity; and the things I’m reflexively likely to deem frivolous or too small to matter are actually what make my life important.
I think we often forget we’re just these tiny little cells of a universal body; and that what we might think doesn’t matter in the long run, what little choices we make day by day, fall through some crack and it’s only the big grand things that matter.
I don’t think it works like that at all.
With a lot of love and a lot of tenderness as the days near their shortest.
Hol