A phone call today and we talked about maybe how purpose is what sets one aright: naturally and steadfast toward whatever vision waiting. As long as you find a purpose you jive with, then maybe things will be okay.
When I worked at a big corporation, technically I had millions of people who depended on me. But I didn’t hear them, and frankly didn’t give a damn. Whether out of callousness or insipidness, never cared. All I was doing was maintaining bureaucratic processes which may lighten the load for those around but it’s all just a carcass anyway.
Doing things for others – a “path of service” – is advertised as a Way To Truth. I don’t doubt it, but helping others feels so abstracted in the modern world. The best help one can give is being the shoulder to listen, I guess. Any other help never felt registered: it just doesn’t feel like a real impact the way feeding someone would, perhaps. Even then, the few times you do make meals for others, it feels insignificant anyway.
There’s other paths, like one of love, or of knowledge – and the trouble is all of these paths feel like nothing. Like it just doesn’t register: can’t be bothered.
So it’s a bit of a trouble, trying to figure out a purpose when every vector of purpose – acquisition of knowledge, alleviation of others’ suffering, acceptance and enhancement of all around – just falls flat.
So maybe I am a broken being, that’s fine. The point I’m making, broken as it all seems, is that we don’t need to elevate it. We don’t need to make things more than they are.
It’s just about feeling alive, right?
When was the last time you felt alive?
All of the things I do for others, or all of the things I learn, or all of the glory one could give above – it just isn’t working. And it doesn’t matter.
You do the above things not because they’re meaningful in themselves.
It’s because it’s hard. The challenge is what makes one feel alive: and these impositions of how you ought to be often forget how difficult it is to be anything at all, let alone strange.
Living can be hard. Expressing yourself can be hard. Writing can be hard. Making websites can be hard. Bothering to talk can be hard. Bothering with dreams can be hard.
And it is precisely the difficulty which will make one feel alive. Overcoming fears and trials, frustrations – listening to someone complain for the 100th time knowing they won’t change. Reading a bunch about the psychological nonsense that you hate and think is all a psyop and is fundamentally useless information, the same as obscure websites filled with gibberish or predictions about the world ending: it just doesn’t matter!
The only thing that matters is how difficult it was. Because that’s the redemption.
Doing that which scares you will always get your heart racing. And if you do it enough times, you’ll be enveloped in a story that’s alive. And with enough difficulties piled on, so you reach the next summit to spread your arms in the harsh wind, hyperventilating. Scream as much as you want, and do all the things you think you can’t, as well as the scary ones.
It is through the challenge that one sinks into the body once more.