The purpose of life is right in front of us.
Welcome to the 102nd episode of Giving Back Insights! Insights are our solo show to celebrate how our guests and their charities serve others, explore actions each of can take to make a difference in people’s lives and connect.
Today we’re talking about The Purpose of Life! Enjoy today’s episode and keep your comments and feedback coming.
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A few days ago I was talking with Winnie Huang, a teammate and friend. She’s a hard worker, very smart, and a delightful personality. She is also a deeply spiritual person of the Christian faith, and when I shared my favorite passage from the bible, Matthew 25:34-40, our conversation veered to what it takes to transform to our best selves.
The central theme of that passage is living a life of service, which I am clearly interested in. For my money, Matthew 25:34-40 is essentially the guiding principle to live a fulfilling life, whether you call our Creator “God”, “Jehovah”, “Allah”, “the Light”, or “the Universe”. The question of transformation came up because for Winnie, although she WANTS to serve freely and joyfully, without thought of recompense or acknowledgement, the mindset of service seems to be in contradiction to our human nature. How do we get there?
We talked about how our bodies respond to doing good for others, the feel-good rush of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin. We talked about the virtuous cycle of Abundance versus the prevailing zero-sum, “I win, you lose/You win, I lose” attitude in most countries. We talked about needing a guiding example (in her case, Jesus Christ) or having what we need in our hearts to live a life of service without a divine figure.
What we were talking about is Choice.
Choosing to respond versus react. Choosing a midlife awakening instead of a midlife crisis. Choosing to be around those who lift you up. Choosing purpose and meaning versus distraction. Choosing behaviors that reflect your intentions and moving forward, open to the outcomes.
Yeah, choice is what it takes to transform into the best version of yourself. Pretty cool to walk away from a conversation immensely satisfied, like a long, cool drink of water on a hot summer day. Zat Rana wrote a great article about choice called “The Purpose of Life Is Right In Front of You” and I’m going to read the juicy bits right now.
Carl Sagan asked us to briefly pause for a moment to look at the image on today’s cover:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
The purpose of life is right in front of us: It’s to create a reality we want to inhabit — to reach towards the better end of our conscious experience. At each moment, in every second of life, we are given a choice about how we want to conduct ourselves in this world, and though it might not always seem like it, each of these choices are of consequence. They each interact with culture to give it a new form; a form that we are responsible for creating by either doing what is right or doing what is wrong in that specific moment.
A grandfather telling stories to a young boy may just nudge that boy to one day write his own stories, ones that help ease the burden on all our minds. An especially caring teacher may infect a little girl with an engineering passion that later gives her the vitality to make the breakthrough that permanently changes our relationship to outer space. And of course, both that boy and that girl may just inspire millions of other people, who may inspire many millions more, in a long, unbroken chain of interactions until perhaps, one day, the ideas of war and hate and poverty will be foreign to us — or at least take a different form, one that is, again, a little kinder, a little gentler.”
Let’s create the reality we choose to live in, Winnie.
Remember: Always err on the side of love & kindness.
Love & Gratitude,
Rob
The Purpose of Life Is Right In Front of You – Zat Rana – Medium
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Backstage at the Giving Back podcastEpisode 275 Giving Back Insights #102 "The Purpose of Life Is Right In Front of You"Jinny Choi Rob Scheer
Posted by Giving Back Podcast on Wednesday, November 28, 2018
