What’s the Point of Your Life?
If we stop to think about it, the attempt to determine a reason for our existence can be a depressing thought path.
For myself, it can often lead to discouraging thoughts about how I haven’t accomplished enough or am behind where I wanted to be at this point in my life.
After a decade of trying different things, I struggle with feeling that it’s no longer worth my effort to keep trying to improve on what I do. That I should simply resign myself to being a cog in the ever-turning wheel of capitalism.
I think “I will never be anyone of any importance.”
“My life is just one more of the seven billion lives taking up oxygen on this planet.”
“No one will remember me after I die.”
Here are a few points that have encouraged me to remember that in the end, it’s not all about me:
I am not an island unto myself.
I am not here only to satiate myself. My thirst for success, my drive to succeed and be someone can become selfish. Is my focus on myself taking me away from people who need me to be there?
It is often easy for me to forget that there are multiple areas of my life that need attention in order for them to be successful. And that success in those areas often matters far more in the long run than the success that I can be hyper-focused on at the moment.
How will my kids remember me? They certainly will remember me in some way. Will it be as a frustrated, always impatient person who never seemed to have enough or be satisfied with life? Or will it be as a fun-loving but firm parent who cared enough to show up consistently and who chose to be present in both mind and body at the times that were important and also just to play games on a Tuesday night?
My imagined success will not feel as great as I think it will be.
Even if I managed to be the next Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, or Gandhi — I will still be a human who struggles with second-guessing decisions made, facing the dissent of opinions, and having to prioritize one thing over another. I may have a greater feeling of success than I do now, but it’s not the great things we think of that ultimately bring the deepest satisfaction.
And history shows us that success is often not recognized at the moment in which it is reached.
J. S. Bach was not widely published until after his death. Much of the prevailing thought in his day was that he was too avant-garde. That he broke too many rules.
Today, hundreds of years after his death, we celebrate him as one of the greatest composers alive. But he lived a very real life, with many children, the death of a spouse, and the anger of superiors. Did he feel like a spectacular success in his lifetime? It is unlikely.
Not all of us are designed for or destined to do visibly great things.
Our great thing could be our choice to be home consistently for our kids. To show up for our spouse when they felt like life was difficult.
We may be setting the family culture and groundwork for a grandchild or great-grandchild who could make some ground-breaking discovery, but die before they do. But without the environment we create now, maybe they would never have had the opportunities they did that enabled them to reach that achievement.
Our greatness may be in the fact that we forgave a sibling that wronged us and worked our whole lives at rebuilding that relationship. Our greatness may be in the fact that we chose to not pursue a glamorous career in acting because we chose our spouse over our career. Or our child over our career.
Our greatness may be in the fact that we simply were there for those in our community. That they relied on us and they knew that we would be there when they hurt or lost someone, or had a letdown.
As hard as it is for me as an “achiever” and a “dreamer” who desperately wants to accomplish big things, I am beginning to learn that the greatest achievements in life are those daily choices made by ordinary people that create the fabric of a safe and stable society.
The river runs ever on. Some of us may be the water that flows by, while others may be a boat that sails on the water and brings change to the future downstream.
Every day, though, we all have the choice to create ripples of change by choosing to do the things that create the greatest good for those we are surrounded by and live among. That may or may not match our current definition of success.
And perhaps there is a deeper success and satisfaction that comes from giving ourselves to others than taking to attempt meeting our own never-satisfied ideas of success.
