Purpose
Who are you?
What do you want to accomplish?
What do you work for?
What do you live for?
Life often seems unfair against us. We have had bad days, and we start cursing life to have handed us a bad hand. We keep ourselves burdened with the baggage of regret, envy, unforgiveness, even hate. Just because we keep this narrative on in our minds that someone or something has wronged us and that we did not deserve a bit of it. This feeling is especially worse when we know we did everything right and still find ourselves on the wrong side of the deal that life offers us. And then we go through that cycle of grieving — first denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression, and finally acceptance.
Each and every time, this is what we go through. And before we know, life passes. People in your life moved on in their lives, our relationships might suffer, we get weaker in health, and life suddenly seems short.
My grandmother passed away early this year. She lived a good long 90+ years. During the final weeks and days, the family also went through here cycle of grief, which ended in acceptance of the reality of her time on this planet. But during this period, there were times when visitations to her home seemed burdensome. It sort of became like a chore and I was told to visit frequently to prevent gossip; some of my relatives were “comparing” the number of times someone visited her and why so-and-so wasn’t here.
What’s the point then, I thought. If our actions are not determined from the heart but just to satisfy some status quo or some ridiculous reason like the one stated above. Isn’t it too late to do this if you have not been a filial child or grandchildren to her when she’s living at the peak of her life. All meaning of your actions would have been for nothing, wasted just because you did not cherish and make full use of your time spent with her.
Roman philosopher Seneca reprimanded anyone who believes that life is short by saying that it is not short but long if we know how to use it. As he wrote in his seminal book, On the Shortness of Life –
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
After this episode, I find some meaninglessness in a lot of external things I am chasing, often sub-consciously — burying yourself in computer games, happiness, money, return on investment, social media, career success.
When I look back at the kind of work I have been doing over the last 4–5 months. I realize I have sort of withdrawn myself from the worries and noise of stocks and the market towards things that I believe are more meaningful in my life. As such, most of my reading and thoughts have not been about how to be a good investor or an engineer, but about how to live a good life and enable those around me to do the same.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
Who are you?
What do you want to accomplish?
What do you work for?
What do you live for?
My grandmother reignited a feeling deep within me, and I must thank her for that.
And so life goes on.
