The Purpose Of My Life?

It's another hot, humid and sunny afternoon in Costa Rica.  I'm out on my bike, pedalling along the quiet roads, enjoying the rhythm of the ride, going no where in particular, content to be sitting on the saddle and to feel the cooling wind that tries to resist my passing.  I'm smiling, feeling carefree and happy, knowing that life at this moment is good.  A thought creeps into my mind. What if I were to do this everyday, to cycle from one place to another, my life on the bike and on the road?  To cycle and to travel, a long held dream that has reawakened in my heart.  Could I do that?

That was a day during October 2013.  I can remember the moment well, but not the date on which it occurred.  I was on the road between the village of Brasilito and the town of Huacas.  Three months later and I'm on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, sitting inside a rented apartment in Auckland, strewn across the living room floor are cycle clothing and camping equipment, and downstairs in the garage, hanging on a bike rack on the wall, is my rented touring bicycle.  That vague idea which had come to me, that resurgence of a once held dream, that longing to travel and to carry my life with me, the need for adventure and to push myself into the unknown, it has all become a waking reality.  It has become my purpose in life.

I get asked often about my life. What I am doing?  What I am going to do?  Why I do what I do?  I have attempted to explain it the best that I can.  I've attempted and I've failed.  After all, it makes no rational nor logical sense does it?  In the last eight years, my journey has taken me all around the world and I have experienced many things, the like of which I thought I could experience only in a book or on film.  I've tried my hand at certain things: I learned to dive and became a dive master; I worked as a project co-ordinator in telecommunications; I walked the streets as a funds collector for a charity; I enrolled at university and became a full-time student; I became a scuba diving instructor; I self published a couple of books.  My journey has taken me through seventeen different countries, in some of which I have enjoyed extended stays and called home for a while.  And now, I am beginning a bicycle tour.  What is going on?

Let me come back to something I wrote in an earlier paragraph: my purpose in life.  I don't have one.  At least, that is, I don't have one in the conventional sense.  As a man, it is my firm belief that my purpose in life is to become a husband, a father, and to raise my own family.  Due to circumstances, this has never happened for me and I drifted through my life searching for something that would fill the void that fatherhood left.  My career filled that gap for many years and I put all my effort and much of my free time into it.  If I was busy at work, then I could never have any time to think about the vacuum that existed away from it.  To be brutally honest, my life outside of work was empty of meaning.  What I did and who I was at the office came to define me.

But there was always something else lurking there.  A vagueness that was almost discernible through the foggy haze but not quite.  As if each time I reached out a hand to grasp hold of it, it pulled back and way from my outstretched fingers.  I thought it was elusive and I believed this until a chance meeting with a colleague (now a dear friend) who forced me to confront my true feelings.  Even then, I was reluctant to give credence to my thinking.  Like so many other people who have held similar thoughts, I shied away from it because it just didn't seem the right way, it wasn't the way that we are taught is correct, it went against conventional thinking and wisdom.

I was searching for some type of purpose in my life and I was not finding that purpose in what I did.  No amount of numbers on a spreadsheet, no amount of promotions at work, no matter what my salary, these gave me no sense of who I truly was as a person.  My life was bereft of meaning.  The epiphany moment occurred around the time of my thirty fifth birthday.  It was then that I came to the realisation that I was living the life of a married man, a family man, and that I was still single.  Why then, did I need to live that life, a life that could not give me my true purpose?  It no longer made any sense to me.  Instead, it seemed to me that the best thing I could do, was to do something different, and to seek a purpose in life for myself.  To go out into the unknown and to look for meaning in the life around me.  And if I was not to discover that purpose in my life, then at least I would have experienced something more, at least I would have taken a chance on life, and not lived out my existence sitting at a desk in front of a laptop screen, and always wondering if there was something more.

     

To answer the question of why do I do what I do, there would seem to be one clear answer - it gives me a purpose in life.  I must continue to live out my dreams until such time that I find the other purpose that I seek.  I truly believe that one day I will find that other elusive part of my life, but until then, I cannot sit and wait for it to come to me.  I must strive to fulfill my dreams, I must write a destiny for myself and if it comes to it, I want to know that when I look back upon my days, when I revisit the history of my life, that I did not sit idly by waiting.  I want to smile and to know that I stood up, that I walked out onto my path, and that I went in search of my purpose.  To try is all that truly matters.

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It was not my intention to write this post today.  That is often how it happens though.  I set out with an idea of what I want to write and the moment that I let myself go, in the instant that my soul opens itself up, the real need to express myself comes to life.  This is why I enjoy writing and find it so very therapeutic.  I write for myself and in doing so, it is my absolute hope that my readers find something for themselves nestled within the words ~ Andy.

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