Purpose and Re-Purpose

I had a specific life plan when I was preparing to graduate high school.  It did not include college.  It was down a specific path into the "real" world.  It took a couple years to reach that goal but I made it.  I realized my purpose.  Check that, I realized the purpose I envisioned in my early twenties.

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to shed before the new one can come." ~ Joseph Campbell

The problem exists when the criteria used to craft our plan changes.  Life happens and things change, both from our choices and the world's choices.  What we believe to be our purpose or direction alters.  Some might call this growing.  It's here that we can either look back with a mournful eye and create fear for what comes next, or we can re-purpose our lives.

My girlfriend is the queen of recycling and reusing items.  She's known as the woman who prints on the back of anything before using a new piece of paper.  I love that mentality.  Very little is void of value.  While driving around one day she pointed out a building that was being remodeled; re-purposed, as she put it.  It seemed to make complete sense to me at that exact moment.

"Each day brings new circumstances that allow us to learn more about life and our own desires.  Our plan today may not suit who we are tomorrow.  The journey of a lifetime need not be mapped in the mind of life's novices." ~ Jason Huntsinger 

I reached that point in my life where, through my own past choices,  I needed to realize a new path. At times it's scared me.  At times it's liberated me.  I've felt like the last 20 years were all for naught simply because I failed to discover the value in failure, and so I viewed it all as failure.  But then I finished that book, wrote an epilogue to myself and closed it up.  What a read!  The most relevant learning in this lifetime comes dressed as failure, but we're too afraid to acknowledge its existence.

Volume 2 has begun...

I've come to understand more and more that we tend to look back with dissatisfaction when we create expectations for ourselves.  The days in our lives and the world around us are far too fluid to try to place it into a mold for what we believe to be perfection.  The life that I envisioned to be in balance when I was 20 is unrecognizable today.  Happiness is not found by constantly checking to make sure the plan is in balance.  It's found in the joy of creating balance.

The only shame in a life of re-purpose is failing to see it.