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Purpose

What if you could somehow know that your purpose in life was to travel ten years through thick jungle, and endure great difficulties in so doing, only in order to get to a complex machine, find one small screw, and turn it one quarter turn?  What if you then had to travel another ten years out of the jungle?

What if your purpose in life were to wait in place for a ball to come bouncing down a chute, and to stand where there is a gap in that chute, lean over, and allow it to roll over you.  If you were not there, it would fall.  You can’t know where the ball comes from, or what its end goal is, but you do know that if you do not stand your turn in place, that life will be worse for many.

It is impossible to know what our purposes are in life, of course, but I would submit that there are countless inflection points, “butterfly effect” points, and that the purpose for many may come and go unnoticed, but none the less critical for it.  One can never know what small effort, what seemingly insignificant act may make a large difference.  You can’t live life sweating every last detail, but at the same time, don’t ignore them either.  Do what you can.  Then do it again.  Eventually they will lay you in the ground, or send you into the sky, and your assignment will change. But the process will not, in my view.  How we live today, in this world, is how we will live in the next world.  We just know more there, and get a LOT more support.

That, in any event, is my orienting belief.