I
understand that life must have a purpose, or, more specifically, an external as
well as an internal purpose.
External Purpose
I realize that in life
setting a purpose is important, but not so important that it drives you crazy
in pursuing it or giving it up altogether. As a matter of fact, there is an
external purpose that only sets me a direction for the destination of my life.
In that direction, there are many different signposts guiding me along the way.
Arriving at one signpost simply means that I have accomplished one task; missing
that signpost means that I am still on the right path but simply taking maybe a
detour or just longer time because of misdirection or getting lost on the way.
Internal Purpose
My internal purpose is
more important: it has nothing to do with arriving at my destination, but to do
with the quality of my consciousness—what I am doing along the way.
That Jesus said: “gain
the world and lose your soul” probably said everything there is to say about
the internal purpose of life for an individual.
External purpose can
never give lasting fulfillment in life due to its transience and impermanence,
but internal purpose, because of its unique quality of being in the present
moment, may give us inner joy and a sense of fulfillment. That is how I feel
about my internal life purpose.
No matter what you do
in your life, just do your very best and do it well, no matter how
insignificant they may be.
“If a man is called to
be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or
Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets
so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a
great street sweeper who did his job well.’” Martin Luther King Jr.
I always tell myself to
try doing everything as if God had called upon me at that particular moment to
do it. Of course, admittedly, it is not always that easy, given that the mind
may be troubled by the ego-self, by invasive and unwanted thoughts from the past
or by projections of those thoughts into the future. But having the mindset
with the right intention is already a first step or breakthrough for me.
I understand that I
have three options in whatever I have
been called to do: do it; not to do it; and do it while enjoying the present
moment of doing. I just do what I have to do, whether I like it or not, just as
Michelangelo painted—who, believing that his talent was in sculpture and
not in painting, was at first unwilling to do the fresco, which turned out to
be one of his greatest masterpieces.
All these years, I have
been doing what I may not like to do, but I have learned to like what I have to
do. As of today, I am in contentment, and my life goes on, continuing doing
what I like to do, or what I have to do.
Sometimes I
would ask that question: “What about tomorrow?”
Well, I cannot speak
for tomorrow. Tomorrow hasn’t come yet. After all, tomorrow is another
day, just as Scarlet O’Hara said in Gone with the Wind.
The “Death” Ingredient
However I look at my
lifespan, I am now closer to the end rather than the beginning. That is to say,
the thought of death has become more and more real with each day passing. I
have come to believe that most elderly people have similar experience.
If I could ask but one question
about the future, it would be: “How am I going to die?” and not “When
am I going to die?”
I wouldn’t want to know
about the when. To me, time is not a big factor. My desire to know the
“how” is just out of plain curiosity. Anyway, they are just hypothetical
questions without any answer.
In life, we all ask
many different questions, some of which are practical, some hypothetical, and
some without an answer. To many, living is a search for an answer to many of
the unanswerable questions in life.
So, stop looking for an
answer to every question asked, but continue to ask, and just live if there
were no tomorrow.
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
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