The Purpose Of Life

It is inevitable in life, that you will encounter a moment, a day, even a week or longer, when everything seems to be wrong.  These are the times when your dreams appear to be the most distant, completely out of your reach.  You feel yourself sinking and what started out as a bit of the blues, gives way to frustration and despair.  You begin to feel lost, unsure of the path that you have been walking.  With this sense of loss, comes the feelings of doubt, fear and perhaps worst of all, loneliness.  You question the point of it all and ask yourself just what is the purpose in life?  Well, what is the purpose? 

The purpose of life.  The question that has plagued humanity for ages past, and will for ages yet to come.  For some of us, our purpose in life could consist of the following: gain a good education, purchase a car, graduate university, establish a career, meet our future partner, get married, take out a mortgage, set up a home, find success and gain promotion in our chosen career, take out a healthcare policy, start a family, set up a savings plan for the children, take out a loan, upgrade the car, take regular vacations, raise the children, establish and maintain friendships, pursue our hobbies and passions, establish a retirement plan and save for retirement, take care of our parents as they grow elderly, retire, enjoy our long overdue chance to relax, and finally and inevitably, to die.

That's quite a list and I only picked the main ones that came to my mind.  There is so much more that could be added, if you really sit down and think on it.  There is certainly a lot of things that we have to deal with in our lives.  Does this list define the purpose of life?  Does this list represent the reason why we are here on this planet?  Well, for me, I'd say yes and no.

For me, there is only one purpose to life. It is simply to make more life.  It is our duty as members of the human species, to make more humans.  That is it.  That is why we exist.  It is that simple.  Dress it up however you wish, but the bottom line is that all of life, every single species, whether it be flora or fauna, exists to propagate it's own species, to survive.  For humans, that means becoming a parent, becoming a father or a mother to a child.  Everything else that we do is just window dressing around this one simple purpose.  Becoming a parent.  That is our purpose in life.

I am not a parent.  I am yet to fulfill my true purpose in life.  I would like very much to become a parent, I believe strongly that I will be one day.  I hope that day is not too far off though, because I am now rapidly approaching my 43rd birthday.  I know that everything that I do now, everything that I have done, has been a prelude to this one thing.  As I am not a father, I am able to exercise my freedom, my lack of responsibility for another human being, and this has enabled me to pursue my dreams.  I had to do that, because if I had not, and I was still not a father, then I would have achieved nothing with my life of any meaning.  A major factor in my decision to quit my old life, was based around the fact that I was not yet a parent, and that I wanted to be one.  Therefore, if I were to pursue my dreams of travel and a more simple lifestyle, then I needed to act before that happened.

You see, when it comes down to it, life really is very simple.  As humans, we tend to believe that there must be something more to life, there has to be a mystery to resolve, an answer as to why we exist.  What makes us different to all other life on this planet (as far as we are aware) is that as humans, we have developed conscious thought and self awareness.  Because of this, we struggle with the question of why we are here.  We believe that there must be something more to life.  There isn't.  Get over it.

Perhaps my view is too simplistic.  Perhaps there is a greater power and mystery that exists and that determines our life events and what happens after.  All I know is that I would like to be a father, as my father is and his father was before him.  I want to see the blood of my fathers continue in my own children.  I want to share all that I have learned with my own children, to give them love, to watch them grow, to witness their mistakes, to share in their joy and in their pain, to make sure that they know they are loved, and to always be there for them.

The purpose of life is simple.  Everything else is just a complication.  If I never become a father, I will look back on my life not with regret.  I shall look back upon my life knowing that I did what I had to do, that I pursued my dreams and my passions, that I gave of myself to others freely, that I loved fiercely, and that I always followed my heart.  I will look back and know that I did what I did because I was driven to do it, and that I never let fear stop me from taking the next step on my path.  I will look back and I will smile on a life that existed because I chose the direction of my path, not a life that was lived because of a path that I was not of my own making.  But what I do know in my heart, is that I will become a father.  I have to hold on to that belief, because if I think otherwise, then I will have failed in the one true purpose of life: to create new life.

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Just As The Rolling Stones Said

Yesterday, I held a friend's four week old baby on my lap and, as I looked down on this miracle of life, I was taken back in time, to one summer many years ago, and I wondered how my life might have been so completely different.  I asked myself if I will ever have a child of my own to hold and to bestow upon them the love and the wisdom that I have to give.  And I asked myself whether I will ever get to fulfill my destiny as a man, and to become a father, or did I miss my chance?

I have learned that life takes us where we need to go and that the journey is not always in the direction that we may wish.  One summer, many years ago, life decided that my path would go a different way from the one that I was expecting it to take.  Back then, I was very much in love, thought I had found my soul mate, I was enjoying a career that was rocketing forward faster than I could believe, my brother was going to be married, and I, unbeknown to my family, was going to be a father.  It was an incredibly exciting time.  Then fate twisted the knife and the picture that I held in my mind of the happily ever after, family man was destroyed beyond all recovery.  Everything was lost to me in just a few words of a conversation, in just a few seconds of time.  As the words fell, so too did the pieces of my life, fragments falling to the floor and shattering, like the most fragile pieces of fine porcelain.

I don't think about this moment too often, but now that I do, I see it with a new perspective.  There was my chance of fatherhood being taken away from me and at the time, so too was the way in which I saw my future.  In the darkness that followed, and days of falling through the abyss of deep, dark, despair and depression, I could see no way ahead.  I felt only loss, the loss of my soul mate from my life and the loss of my chance for fatherhood.  One moment I had stood, basking in the rays of warm light, in love and going to become a father, the next, I stood in the darkness, utterly alone with my loss.  The days that followed, the weeks and the months, were difficult.  I was lucky to have a very good friend who helped me through it, who dragged me out and would not let me stay in my stupor and malaise.  He laughed as I hit golf balls one evening at the driving range and said that each one must have had the face of my ex.  I laughed along, not able to tell him that he was wrong, that I was still in love and that I felt no anger, just sorrow at my loss.  I recovered, just as everyone always does, but it took me a long time.

Now that I think about that evening, when my world shifted completely, I know that everything that has occurred in my life since, would never have come to fruition.  On one hand, I lost my chance of fatherhood and family life, but on the other, I have everything else.  I am not bitter about what happened.  In fact, I am thankful because it has allowed me to accomplish everything that I have, and to experience so many wonderful things in my life.  It allowed me to discover my true path in life, the path that has true meaning for me.

I will never know where the other path would have led me.  I never think back and wonder about it.  There is no point and I consider that as wasted time and energy.  My feelings tell me that things would not have worked out, they could not have worked out.  I have this deep feeling that at the time I was still not ready.  Perhaps I would have been able to adapt and evolve myself, I will never know and so there is little point in thinking on it.  My path took a new direction, life had another purpose for me, and life took me to a place I could never have dreamed.  From that point in my life, which was probably one of my lowest, everything changed and life has given me so many wonderful gifts and opportunities.  It tells me that we should never give up, even when all hope seems to be lost and gone, because it never is.

I my still be childless, I may still not be a father, but I do know that my time will come.  Yesterday, as I held that tiny bundle of life, I knew beyond doubt that I want that for myself.  I would like to be a father, I would like to be a husband.  Sometimes in life, we can't always get what we want, but if we try, we often get what we need.

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