Follow the Tracks

There's so much emphasis in self-help guides to "discover your life's purpose." But what they leave out is that it's your life's purpose that discovers you.

Purposes are like creative ideas, floating around, unmanifested, looking for a life through which to flow and become something in the world.

Instead of believing you have to find a purpose, a mission, a calling, what happens when you think about as being the person you are in the world seeing seeing what comes your way?

Instead of actively finding a purpose, like hunting, what if it was something you caught passively, like a cold?

Sure sometimes people can say, "My purpose in this life is to be a parent/find solutions to increasing pollution/save baby raccoons." But that just means they've already caught it.

However, sometimes purposing one purpose or calling leads you to another. Maybe while saving baby raccoons you learn you have a penchant for identifying animal tracks which leads you to studying botany and years later you find that people all over your county are coming to you to learn the healing plant remedies they can grow in their own backyards. Or maybe you instead learn to build a robotic baby raccoon feeder and you tach your kid how to make something for the duck they are raising and all a sudden you realize that your real passion is in teaching kids how to train machines to save animals.

All I'm saying is you never know. But if you follow the tracks for what you love, what you love will find you.