I agree with this strongly.
Also, try not to worry too much about this part.
Our perceptions of the timeframes involved in personal transformation are notoriously unreliable.
You didn’t notice how far away your ideal future is, you noticed how far away it feels.
There’s a difference.
There’s a unique brand of joy that arises within you when you orient towards your purpose.
Notice, I didn’t say when you attain or reach it. Just when you orient towards it.
It’s like tuning the radio to the right station.
Just feels right.
One of the great protections against despair is actually not setting up your life perfectly; it’s increasing your tolerance for the moments of vagueness and unclearness. The more you can know–while in that space–that you are okay, the more you find a kind of freedom. Freedom to actually grow and travel.
This is what is known to people who learn to go through difficulty and challenge, and what is unknown to people who simply ‘get it right’ from early on.
So don’t worry about that feeling of ‘I don’t know what my purpose is’. Treat it a bit like being drunk. If a person is drunk or high and they have no perspective at all on what is happening, it can be pretty miserable. If a person is drunk or high, and s/he knows she is drunk or high, they still look like an idiot; but there’s a certain level of damage-control that can kick in.
It’s the difference between owning something and projecting that thing onto the world or reality.
Take pain for example.
When you own pain, it still hurts. “Ouch, my knee hurts.” But there’s a limit and a context to it. But when you don’t own pain, it feels like it’s an attribute of the universe. The entire Universe is painful!!!
There are many, many people in the world walking around projecting like this. “Women are nasty!” “Men are cruel!!” “The world is a cold, disgusting place!”
And so on.
These are people who do not know how to own their feelings. So they project them onto the world. And in doing so, they unintentionally emphasize and reinforce those exact same perceptions.
(Imagine if instead of saying, ‘the world is nasty and horrible’, the person was capable of saying, ‘I feel sadness and fear’.)
This is one of the deeper purposes of so-called attention training and mind-trainings, such as vipassana/mindfulness or whatever other name people choose to call them.
Take ownership of your perceptions, however wonky they may currently happen to be. Connect to the world that is beyond your mere perceptions. Becoming grounded even in the midst of apparent groundlessness. Sounds mysterious. But it’s as simple as remembering that ‘Just because I’m drunk right now, it does not mean that everyone and everything else is somehow drunk. The drunkenness is mine.’ The world is not drunk, I am.
This is one of the powers that an adult has, and that a child does not have.
(There are also many other powers that children have.)
