Why am I here? This very simple question comes up throughout our lives at moments of crisis. It also comes up in philosophy lectures, art courses and spirituality workshops, which is a good thing because prepares us to face moments of crisis when they occur. However, working with this question over the years has taught me that it can be misleading. Asking "Why am I here?: presupposes that we will find our purpose, and this isn’t necessarily so.
This blog post is a response to a podcast I heard last week. It made me think deeply about the impact of the coronavirus on the world and on western culture in particular. The person said, “We are not here because of mankind's ingenuity. We are here because the sun shone on the water, microorganisms multiplied in the soil, and life evolved into what we experience today.“ In other words, we are a product of nature, not of our own intelligence or hard work.
This made me ponder how I typically answer the question of why I came into being. I normally hunt for a philosophical solution to the problem of existence. While philosophy has its place, it is borne out of our need to make sense of things, especially those things which aren't immediately clear. For example, the sheer number of human beings in existence makes it hard to say if and how we are special. Surely, we protest, there must be more to our being here than simple replication of the species?
We try to create meaning and purpose through our imagination. We invent stories. Like artists, we try to mould our experiences into some sort of significance that will impress, move or inspire an audience. Gathering our memories of childhood, we look for inciting incidents and try to follow plot threads in the hope of finding a satisfying theme. After all, a life must have a thematic vein to be worth something, mustn't it?
If we find that our story lacks a theme, we strive to find one. hence, our thirst for God, or some other spiritual essence. Our quest takes us far and wide, examining causes that tug at our hearts and minds, and trawling through role models in the search for someone whom we can emulate. The work is hard because it requires discipline, application of principles and, inevitably, disillusionment at many points along the way. No wonder it is called a journey! It is a trip that can take years, batter our hearts, crush our beliefs and reduce us to hopelessness and despair.
Could it be that meaning and purpose are never to be found? Perhaps they do not exist outside of us at all — at least, not in the philosophical or spiritual sense. To suppose that they do requires us to view ourselves as pawns on someone else's chessboard, and to hope that the said someone has virtuous intent. What might that intent be? To preserve our livelihood? to grant our nation victory? To bring peace to all mankind? to ensure our species' mastery over the earth?
Whatever purpose we choose reveals our self-centredness. Our gain is someone else's loss. How could God, who made the heavens and the earth, favour you or me in the great, overarching scheme of things?
Purpose is not externally bestowed. It is something we dream up for ourselves. What we call our life's purpose is simply what we choose to focus on above everything else. I may choose to focus on knowledge rather than caring for others, and my choice ends up inevitably leaving others feeling neglected. You may focus on making money rather than conserving natural resources, and your choice inevitably results in depletion of those resources. The narrower our focus, the less aware we end up being about the consequences.
Maybe it is time to stop thinking so much about purpose and pay more attention to the way things happen outside our scope of influence. If purpose was involved in our being here at all, it was the age-old purpose of the earth becoming alive, complex, expressive and aware of itself through the consciousness of human beings.
As one of those human beings who happens to be alive today, I find this both humbling and liberating. It is humbling because I am simply one of billions who have walked this earth. I'm not in the least bit special in the overall project of life, only special to those who have known and loved me since my birth. It is liberating because it relieves me of the burden to achieve anything with lasting value. While I can pursue purpose as an individual, that purpose need not save the planet. As a person with skills and a desire to make a difference, I respond to the inner impulse to grow,, but only within my unique set of limitations.
This has pertinence in this season of pandemic. Our reason for existence is the same as the reason for a tree's existence. We are born, we grow, we leave our mark, we die. Then we subside back into the earth so that new life can take our place. It's a story of perpetual emergence and submergence, a testimony to the incredible force which keeps all things in motion.
In the final analysis, then, I am here because the earth is here. Earth's purpose was and is to keep on evolving, changing, transforming and producing novelty. Being an expression of that novelty is cause for wonder, and so I choose, as my life's purpose, to be a wonderer.
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