After I first encountered the threshold that would take me into the next adventure of my life, I had just come back from being out on extended sick leave due to whooping cough. That, to say the least, was a nasty fight!
The good thing is that being out sick like I was I had time to do a lot of thinking. One of the things I had been thinking about for a long time was what was I to do with my life. I honestly felt like my life was being directed at this point. For some reason, I needed to get a disease that would frequently have me choking for breath and coughing so hard that I would lose consciousness.
My future was something I thought about while I was out on sick leave. I felt a strong sense that change was imminent. I just didn't know what change looked like.
Dealing with a serious illness has a tendency to make one think about life and what it all means. In my religion, it is generally accepted that the purpose of life is to be proven worthy of returning to live with God. I'm good with that in the macro sense. What I really wanted to know is at the micro level. What is my life purpose?
I guess one of the things I was looking for was meaning in the experiences I had had in life. I have always felt that there is something more than surface level of survival and existence. More than providing for my family and watching them grow. More than developing skills and abilities. More than filling out a resume of accomplishments.
Stephen R. Covey wrote of leaving a legacy. What was my legacy to be?
That question has often been on my mind—almost to the point of obsession. I believe that one of the reasons I struggled so much at the work I was doing was that I felt so out of tune with whatever that purpose was. I wasn't fulfilling my unknown purpose, so I didn't feel fulfilled. I didn't feel satisfied with the life I was living. In fact, I felt quite the opposite.
I felt an overwhelming feeling of incongruency—like I was on one path but was meant to be on another. It's like being lost in the airport. I found I was in the wrong terminal and my plane was leaving soon. I knew I needed to get to the right gate to get on that airplane, but I didn't even know where that gate was.
My time at the job where I had been when I got whooping cough lasted a few more months before layoffs began to happen in the company, and I was laid off.
Since then, I have been on a mission to figure out my purpose in life. And, not in some general purpose of the word but what was my individual purpose? What would it take for me to feel like my life to have purpose?
I became unwilling to put that on hold while I got back to the life I had established. What had been comfortable became anything but.
My family and my faith have remained constants in my life. But I knew that if I were to find satisfaction, I knew I needed to do more than put food on the table and a roof over our heads.
I knew there would be no easy answers. Plumbing the depths of one's soul is an awful lot of work! And can be incredibly confronting!
But I began to get signs that I was on the right path. A kind of breadcrumbs of the soul.
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