Sometimes I have these really brilliant insights. Unfortunately I have them at very inconvenient times when I am nowhere near a computer or pen and paper or voice recorder or any way of capturing these insights and my fickle memory fails to hold onto them for any longer than it takes me to utter said insights into the ether. Someone once told me that the brain is a complex machine that potentially remembers everything it sees, hears, thinks, etc. Thus the failure is not in the memory, it is in my ability to retrieve what is stored there. Either way, my brilliance is lost to the world. So I hesitate when I am writing this blog in part because I am usually writing in the evening after a long day at work when my ability to achieve coherent thought and then on top of that retain an ability to string those coherent thoughts into a cogent, coherent piece that is well worth the five minutes or so it probably takes an average reader to peruse it and digest its meaning. So on any given evening I come to my computer with the hope that I can take what I am sensing in my spirit, feeling in my heart, and thinking in my head and put it into a form that can be useful to you who take the time to read it. May it be so.
Tonight I am grateful for slowly gaining the clarity I have been asking for and seeking for many many months, perhaps even years. At the very least it’s been a few years as evidenced by my titling my daily journal “Writing My Way to Clarity,” when I began writing in mid-2011. This morning I was looking for something I had written some time ago. I couldn’t remember when exactly, but I had flagged it with one of those post-it-note flags that now littered various pages of the five journals currently stacked on my bedside table. In looking for it what I found was a movement toward clarity that perhaps I could have only seen looking back at it rather than while it was unfolding. Reading journal entries from five and six months ago revealed a depth of thought and analysis of my situation that I couldn’t have realized was happening real time. I am a big fan of writing as a tool for clarifying what one is thinking and feeling and therefore understanding a particular action or direction one needs to take. For some folks talking it out works better, but my little introverted self does much better when I can process things alone, more slowly, and in writing.
I was talking with a close friend today about finding one’s life purpose. “I’ve been wanting to know my life’s purpose for my whole life,” I told her, “But it’s been slowly dawning on me that while I was trying to figure out what my life’s purpose was, I was actually doing it!” I can remember a several years ago picking up the book, “A New Earth,” by Eckhart Tolle and being caught by the promise held in the subtitle, “Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.” At last someone was going to tell me how to determine what my life’s purpose was. I listened to the entire book on Audio as well as reading along with the paperback. I was keenly disappointed when I got to the end of it and felt no closer to knowing my life’s purpose than I had been before I invested the listening and reading time. If I had thought about it a bit more I would have seen the clue in the subtitle “Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.” It wasn’t about running around trying to figure what I was meant to do, what my purpose on the planet was. What I am meant to do, my calling, my life’s purpose is already laid out before me and I have been walking in it throughout much of my life. My job is to awaken to/discover what’s already true. Simple, huh? Yeah, right!
I won’t pretend to have the full answer to this whole finding life purpose thing. But I have a bit of experience and wisdom on the matter gained through a wide variety of life situations that have provided some measure of clarity. Over the next few days I will do a bit more contemplation on the matter and share my outcomes. If I can remember my brilliant points, form them into coherent words and sentences, and stay awake during the writing them out (I’ve fallen asleep three times since I began writing this), I will share them in this blog. In the meantime, as it is now after midnight (I started this blog at 8:30 p.m.) I will wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.
