One in Seven Billion, Totally Unique

What is your purpose in life and how do you know if you've found it?  Getting back to the clues the universe leaves around, the fingerprints of your talent and gifts, I believe you know early on what fascinates you, pulls you into its realm of possibility.  Math?  Dance?  Texture?  Words?  Patterns?  Ideas?  No one knows the things you know in exactly the way you know them or will ever live the sequence of events you have lived through.  Horrors and joys, love and anger in the places you have known them make you able to do what only you can do, create only as you can.

There are things that you discount because they are simple to you.  You have not pushed the boundaries of what you can do with your talent if the thing is easy to you or boring.  If the thing that you love to do is difficult but fascinating, do it; something about that fascination is a clue to you about your essential qualities, the you that is nobody else.  Maybe there is something you feel is crucially important to work on and cannot let go of.  That's what's working you; your gifts are being brought to bear.

The most frustrating tragedies in life are often due to a denial of true self.  The great loss of talent and potential through oppression and too-early death is an immeasurable tragedy.  But poor self-esteem, lack of awareness of possibility and a sense of false obligation to standards imposed by others are potentially as ruinous to us as death is.  Often in society we feel obliged to do what others tell us to do, believing they understand our destinies and our hearts better than we understand our own.  But that's impossible.  Nobody knows you like you, and no one sees the situation just like you do.  Witnesses to crimes and catastrophes all have tell a different version of what happened - they all literally saw something different than the other witnesses did.

In a way, the uniqueness of our personal existence leads to loneliness and a sense of separateness.  We may say, "No one sees it like I do; no one understands me," and it's the truth.  In my opinion, I want to see it like no one else does.  I don't want to be the same as anyone else.  I was born me, and that is who I must be.  However, if I forge ahead without considering the giving of my gifts to the world, my talents will become burdens, to me and to my community.

I don't believe that talent or purpose is so easy to recognize that we can just sit under a shade tree until the apple of opportunity falls into our laps.  Joseph Campbell said he wished the term he coined "follow your bliss" had been expressed as "follow your blisters."  It's a trudge, a lifelong journey undertaken to express our talent and find purpose in life.  Who doesn't ask, "Why am I here?"  I have, many times. Seems to me my purpose is to find my purpose, and I'm still trying to figure it out.