40 - What is the purpose of life? (but make it fun!)

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Right after college, I remember reading an Alan Watts quote in which he said something like “the purpose of life is so simple, it is just to be alive.”

I remember thinking he was wrong. I remember thinking, “But I am alive, and that does not feel like enough. My life feels sad and dark and empty and boring, even when it supposed to feel exciting. Surely, there is more to life than just being alive.”

I spent so many years trying to find my Passion with a capital P.

I was desperate to find the thing that would make me feel the way fighting makes Conor McGregor feel or the way writing makes JK Rowling feel.

What I discovered instead was the truth that things we are passionate about, as wonderful as they are, are merely sparkling conduits to our deepest feelings of aliveness.

I don’t know if this is what Alan Watts meant, but I have found that the purpose of my life is to feel alive, which sounds simple. But it is a terrifying undertaking because it requires almost constant discomfort. But the alternative is so much worse. As Paulo Cohelo said “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine - it’s lethal.”

Maybe you read “feeling alive” as partying and drinking or chasing instant gratification or living as a beach bum. But those things usually don’t make me feel alive. They make me feel like I am avoiding life.

When I feel sad, dull, and lifeless, I have to go out and be desperate for life itself. I don’t dream of being a billionaire or a mother or a CEO. Having those titles never gave anyone joy. The life woven in the pursuit of doing them well did.

Which is why I have no mountain top I’m desperate to reach. I have mountains I’m excited to climb.

I am desperate to be shaken back to child-like wonder as often as possible, to grow ceaselessly, to be radically honest, to learn, to bare my soul, to see your soul bared too, to feel, to explore, to risk being judged, to dance with danger, to fall and get back up again, to try and fail and try again, and most of all, to love. I don’t mean romance. I mean the space where I have found all of life be— in that vulnerable messy tangle between two people, between you and me.

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