Day 35
purpose
Even in our childhood we were trying to understand why we did or didn’t, could or couldn’t, should or shouldn’t. We asked “why?” looking for the purpose of the menial tasks our parents gave us, or the purpose of looking nice, or staying clean, or avoiding certain people. We begin life obsessed with purpose.
Yet, so much of our adulthood is spent avoiding the same questions. We start out so intent on discovering why we are doing what we are doing, why it matters so much to be a certain way, only to surrender to a culture that is obsessed with distracting us from purpose. Just buy this, just do that, just post a million pictures of yourself and your life on social media until you become somebody, says the machine. And so we are led glassy-eyed, to lives with purposes dictated to us by whoever profits.
We stop asking why—until we have only enough money to buy what we need, until our movement is restricted and we cannot run from this to that activity or experience, until we become saturated with the hours we have spent scrolling through images and words and “stories” that leave us feeling empty. Then, looking out our windows, perhaps we see a tulip. Perhaps we ask how it got there. Reaching deeper still, we might wonder at the hidden purpose it serves.
Reaching still deeper, and deeper, into the forgotten curious minds of our childhood, might we ask what hidden purpose we serve, and how we got so distracted from the necessary questions?