I’m an addict: purpose & procrastination

I wonder if there’s anyone else on the planet who ponders “life purpose” as much as I do.

I think I’ve thought about it every single day since I was but a wee recruiter crying in my car en route to work back in 2016.

Just to give a small piece of evidence for proof of how much I ruminate on finding my “purpose”, I currently have 39 iPhone notes that mention the word. That’s not even including how many times I’ve focused on it as the subject of my handwritten diary entries!

Everyone says to just chase your passion and then you’ll end up finding/living your purpose. Well, it appears I’m passionate about… finding purpose.

Reid always tells me that it’s at least better I’m asking all these questions about it now versus running on the proverbial hamster wheel of the rat race towards retirement. However… it doesn’t feel like a good thing when all I do is question question question and never take any actual steps towards living meaningfully, because… procrastination.

Self-Sabotage

Over the weekend, I was reading more of The Heroin Diaries, and Nikki Sixx wrote on April 24, 1987:

“I feel like a rat on a wheel. At first I embraced this, then I wanted to get off, but it’s like somebody is turning it faster and faster. I fall and it throws me around and I just can’t stop…”

(pg 136)

Reading this, I now think that maybe I relate to Nikki Sixx because I’m an addict too – but not to heroin… to self-sabotage by means of procrastination. 

At first, I thought it was so cool, how I became an adult and suddenly there was no punishment for not getting something done by a certain time. 

So then I start to procrastinate everything. Cleaning out my closet, doing laundry, calling the bank, making that doctor appointment, brushing Lincoln, writing thank you notes, publishing blog posts, flossing my teeth… Until today, when I look back through my iPhone notes and see I have book ideas dating all the way back to when I first started diarising in iPhone notes from 2016 on, and suddenly, this “freedom” to choose to put off things I think I want to achieve doesn’t seem so cool anymore.

Can you imagine what all kinds & sorts of purposes I could have found and unlocked by now if I’d actually started regularly publishing my writing four years ago??

Purpose

At the end of last week, I decided to finally watch The Secret on Netflix. Let’s see what all this Law of Attraction stuff is really about. Could this “secret” help me start living into my life’s purpose?

While I definitely think the concepts of manifestation and the power of our thoughts & emotions are right up my woo-woo spirituality alley, the real “aha” moment from this movie for me came from a simple segment in the final 8 minutes.

One of the speakers began talking about how he used to view purpose as this divine designation from God, where there was a metaphorical blackboard in the sky with your name assigned to a life’s purpose from birth. I have viewed purpose & calling this way. I’ve felt that life has meaning and God placed each person on Earth for a specific and unique purpose. If I could only discover what my assignment is, then I could start working to fulfill it!

But, there is no giant blackboard in the sky. No neon sign flashing “vacancy” at you waiting for you to check-in to your calling room card.

Your purpose is what you say it is.

Read that again. I sure rewound and watched him say it again.

“Your mission is the one you give yourself.”

“You are the author, designer of your own destiny.”

(probably paraphrased, but those are more lines from the notes I took as I watched)

God made us all unique, gave us unique gifts and innate talents and skills and desires and passions. He also gave us free will.

We have free will for the purpose of deciding what we want our life’s mission to be. We can co-create the legacy we want to leave with the way God designed us.

I choose for mine to be positively impacting others through my writing.

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Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash