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How do you find the one thing that you’re meant to be doing?
This is a question that people often ask themselves.
I’ve also asked myself this question, and I’ll continue to ask it.
I think part of the purpose of living and growing is always staying curious, always pursing answers even if you’re not certain you’ll ever find them.
Because the purpose is in the asking.
When I was younger, I thought that all adults eventually get to a point where they have all of the answers, that they know what they are supposed to be doing, and that they live the rest of their days content in that knowledge.
Now that I have gathered enough life experience, I know how laughable my youthful thought was.
Any person who says that they know it all is not a person to be trusted.
Because that person is a person who has severed one of the core life processes, the unending learning process.
When you commit to the learning process—day by day and week by week—you commit to life.
Like a river that appears the same but is just an undulating mass of constant change, all humans move through time as changeable objects.
Transmogrification is magic.
One day you wake up and you feel the same as you’ve always been.
Then, one day you wake up, and you realize you are ten years older.
This is the roiling sea of life. This is the process without an end.
Now, is this just a long-winded way of saying that life has no meaning, that there is no point in deciding what each of us must do?
Far from it.
The important task of that is thoughtful and complete living can—and should—be committed to.
There is meaning to be gleaned from the pursuit of an almost-opaque cloud of perceived nothingness.
Because we are all part of that nothingness.
Until we are not.
Until we break free as individual droplets misting in and out of view.
The life you create for yourself is but a pinprick of emotions. It’s a tiny droplet of water.
And no one will care as much about your life as you do.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t rush toward the rest of the droplets.
It doesn’t mean that what starts as mere surface tension can’t, one day, become a raging torrent.
Only you can know if you have that within you.
If you point yourself in the direction that only you can feel, you’ll start to attract men and women of similar properties, human beings made of the same stuff that you are.
After all, we all are mostly water.
And this brings me to my closing thought.
There is not only one thing that you can do. “What should I do with my life?” was never supposed to lead to just one answer.
There is not one thing that is meant for you, at least not in the sense that there is a solitary profession emblazoned with your name.
What is a profession but a social construct? Is that how you define yourself?
Is that how anyone will see you once you are gone?
Or will they remember how you made them feel?
And won’t they recall the stories you left behind?
Your impact is in the movement you created with the waves you generated from the tiny droplets you managed to amass into something beautiful while you were here.
You have that power within you.
You have the power to realize that asking what you should do with your life is the wrong question entirely.
You’re already in the process of doing something.
You are already a different person than you were five minutes ago.
As long is you’re in motion, the path you take knows no bounds.
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This post previously published in Nerve 10 and is reprinted with the permission of the author.
Photo courtesy Unsplash.