DO CHILDHOOD INTERESTS REVEAL PURPOSE?
“Calling gets clear. Calling gets loud inside.”
Recent readings have caused me to revisit the notion of having a personal purpose. In this case, I'm reading a book by Robert Greene, who contends that we need a sense of purpose, and that by taking a memory inventory of that which captivated us as children will help reveal that purpose. In other words, the desires of childhood innocence are key to clearly knowing one's purpose in life. The follow-up notion is that a life's purpose is essentially one's calling, and it's this calling that sustains us.
Personal Purpose
Is the concept of a personal purpose a reasonable expectation in the 21st Century? It's a romantic notion that each of us has some sort of path to a manifest destiny. In fact to believe in such requires an astonishing level of subjectivity, to say it nicely. It could be that believing in a purpose is a desperate reach.
Is it healthy to cultivate a sense of purpose? Does it add positively to our mental health? I think yes. Creating a sense of purpose does fill a gap in our souls. The key to it being healthy is how we create that sense and how seriously we take it when challenged.
Purpose Clues
Then does it follow that the best way to arrive at this sense of life's purpose is to examine childhood tendencies and get clear about what made us happy while we were "uncorrupted?" To take a next logica step, is happiness, childhood or otherwise, a clue to identifying purpose?
We check a partial "No" box on this one. If you have had a nurturing childhood this might be a true compass. Many of us have not, so this cannot be the only way to purpose. Rather, clues to purpose may be found within experiences which resonate within us, whether real to us or conveyed by another. Purpose is a transmitted frequency.
Calling Path
Calling is a sense of purpose that sustains one's life. I agree that statement does seem a bit extreme. To take it a bit further, the term calling invokes thoughts of influence from the Divine, or whatever Universal Intelligence one espouses. How does such a leap evolve? I think it's quite a natural formula: Time + Rumination + Actions + Positive Feedback = Behavioral Belief.
A loose sense of purpose keeps things interesting, and tickles the fringe of our consciousness – it gives us a quiet and vague hope. You can have glimmers of purpose without calling, but not a calling without purpose. Calling forms from the stuff of purpose and becomes what we pour our purpose into. Calling gets clear. Calling gets loud inside.
