Do I have a purpose?
I enjoy seeing my life as a largely academic matter, to be poked and prodded and examined, turned over carefully and peered at. And yet, I feel things, but even as I feel them, deeply and truly and profoundly, I examine the feelings as something that is a natural part of me, an extension of who I am, like a rock might have ridges or a fish may have scales. Not as things that do or don’t “belong there.” But as the way I happen to settle in to my natural position in the universe.
Life sometimes feels exciting and enjoyable, and it also feels, at times, dreadful, and at other times pensive, at times full of pleasure, and at other times full of pain. And yet, throughout it all, threaded deeply within all these aspects, is the inflation and deflation of my lungs, the beating of my heart, the hum of electrons in my brain, the feel of life pervading the entirety of my sense of being.
This is the simplicity and complexity of life for me. As for “purpose” — I do not know if it is a coherent concept, but the descriptions I’ve heard of it seem to indicate it is something you were made for, or something you need to earn your right to exist. If that’s the case, I can’t relate. I was not made to mean anything or to somehow earn my full rights to existence. I get the sense that, somehow, at least here in Texas, I am supposed to find this profoundly depressing. I do not. It just is. Like breathing, like touch, like sight, like sound, like the rain pounding the roof or the sun tanning my skin or the calmly flowing by Trinity River on a quiet summer day.
Purpose, to me, is noise. Purpose is standing, looking over the Grand Canyon, and asking why it’s there. Not the question of how it came to be there – which is easy enough – but why it’s there. I prefer not to bother with such questions. I prefer to look across the canyon in the silence and just enjoy the beauty of our simultaneous existence.
I’m not saying it’s better to live this way. I’m not preaching a sermon to you or telling you how to live your story, unless that’s what you want this to be. I’m just telling you mine.
I do not always think this way, I admit. Sometimes I come down to the “real world” and wholly immerse myself in my daily affairs with some gusto and an illusion of what you might call “purpose.” But more often than that, I embrace a purposeless life, with the assurance that I’m here, a natural fixture of the universe, emotions and thoughts and all, and there need be no more meaning for this business of being here than there is behind Niagara Falls.
It’s all just part of the same thing, and I’m in it, and really, that’s all I know. But it’s enough to keep this atheist going with a profound sense of peace and unapologetic belonging.
Thanks for reading.