Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay
Recently my teenage son asked me, "What's the purpose of life?" He was avoiding something unpleasant at the time, so I gave him a flippant answer: "Suffering."
He looked at me and said, "No, I want a serious answer."
So then I had to think a bit. When your teenager asks a question like that and wants a real answer, the stakes feel high.
What came out was something like this:
"To me, the purpose of being alive is to engage with Life as fully as I possibly can, the parts I like and the parts I don't, in a way that encourages it to offer me more of the things I like."
That answer is still with me a few days later, asking to be expanded. Here's what I've come up with so far in an effort to put some more words to what I believe about the purpose of life.
Life can only give us what we're able to hold
Whether you know it or not, you are in a relationship with Life and it wants to pour itself through you. It wants you to live a life that feels satisfying and full, because that way Life gets to express more of itself through you.
But Life can only pour into us what we're capable of holding.
Dr Kelly Brogan calls this our "havingness," which in this moment I'm defining as "our capacity to receive, hold, and integrate what we say we want."
The purpose of growth is to increase our havingness.
Growth requires something of us
Sometimes we find ourselves haggling, weighing what we want against what it requires of us. When we fear that the price may be more than we can pay we withdraw, close, defend, harden, shrink.
In those moments of fear and smallness, we forget that Life has our back. We forget that the price is not a penalty, but an invitation to allow ourselves to be deepened so that we can receive and contain more than we could before.
The invitation is to stay soulfully engaged with everything Life presents us with - the difficult, lonely, boring, frustrating bits and also the enjoyable, invigorating, satisfying bits.
All of it, even joy--especially joy--asks us to deepen, open, and receive so that Life can flow through us more generously.
To the extent that we're willing to engage with all of this and more, we live lives that are rich and satisfying.
Optional prompts for further exploration
Where in my life am I holding myself back from full participation?
What am I afraid would happen if I engaged wholeheartedly?
Where did this fear come from, and can I be compassionate toward the part of myself that holds it?
Please comment...
Thoughts? Please scroll down and share them..