Forget About Finding Your Life’s Purpose.
It is too vast to name, too sacred to define— meant to be lived, not captured.
March 18, 2025 | Zurich, Switzerland
I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted by all the advice on finding your purpose and defining it in a sentence as a panacea for living a fulfilled life.
First, according to me, much of the advice out there is simply old-fashioned goal and intention setting — and has little to do with life's deeper purpose.
Second, most of the purposes I hear expressed are too often tied to trendy or politically correct issues to be truly truthful.
Also, the focus on changing the world and solving social or environmental issues is, more often than not, the result of an unconscious entanglement with an injustice in our family system, rather than something deeply personal and value-based.
And last but not least, purpose is not something we can define once — or even a few times — in our lives and then cage into a simple sentence.
All I see in the public domain painfully reminds me of how organizational missions are crafted — with a focus on good marketing rather than something essential and true. And no wonder. Personal missions have become mainstream since personal branding and social media presence became a thing.
So then, what is a life’s purpose?
Accoding to me, life’s purpose is the quiet and often unspoken longing that moves us toward beauty, truth, and creation. It is a way of being in the world, in connection and alignment with our soul and with Nature.
It is a mystery unfolding moment by moment — never fully known, but always felt when we live in alignment with what lights the fire inside us and makes our eyes shine.
Our life’s purpose is not out there, waiting to be sought and found. It is always within us — easier felt in silence than during constant activity.
It is the creative force inside of us, which we offer to the world — just as a tree cannot help but grow and bloom.
It is who we are being when we say yes to the deep currents moving through us — it’s the art of becoming an instrument through which life itself can create, heal, dream.
It is a living force moving through our veins — a fragile and ever-evolving unknown —too vast to name, too sacred to define— meant to be lived, not captured.
What’s wrong with defining it?
The surest way to deny our purpose is to search for it outside ourselves — or worse, to let others define it for us. The moment we look outward for something that can only be felt inward, we turn away from the very source we seek.
Trying to fit purpose into a sentence is like taking something alive — something ever-flowing, ever-changing — and freezing it into a monument of words. No matter how beautiful or precise, it becomes a still image of what was once moving. At best, it is a snapshot of a moment in time, a reflection that has already passed.
But life’s purpose is not meant to be carved in stone. It is a living current, flowing and evolving in rhythm with our life. To define it is to risk stripping it of its aliveness — we would barter something wild and sacred for something safe and fixed.
Purpose is to be lived, embodied, and surrendered to. It is something we meet anew in every moment we choose to show up in alignment with what stirs our soul.
When I speak of ego it really captures this sense of trying to control everything, to name it and file it in its proper spot on the shelf. BTW, this has been a lifelong tendency of mine and I still to this day struggle with it. But when we try to define things so strongly, like a particle, it escapes into the wave and eludes us altogether—the more we try to capture it the quicker it evades us and we find ourselves chasing solutions in life without ever grasping them. I've only very recently begun to allow myself to simply be immersed in the flow of life and live within it. The more I do, the more easily I recognize the illusion of certainty.
Yes! Beautiful..."meant to be lived, not captured". This makes me think of all the distraction created in public forums that have been 'industrialized', like commercialized 'big' media and how dangerous they truly are. It doesn't take much to throw you off. All the hours of watching and listening to the crafted manipulations and opinions 'out there' can lead you astray from the most subtle desires for self expression and creativity. The continued separation from our inner voice can create confusion and ultimately loss of meaning.
The loss of meaning in one's life, I believe, is a mistaken perception. There is always meaning but if one loses touch with that meaning or can no longer recognize it, this can mean a lifetime of hard choices. The presence of emotional vampires and abusers in one's life is a sure sign that you've lost the plot of your inner being. Redrawing boundaries and daring to spend time alone, in reflection is often a necessary form of healing. Setting aside time to create, play music or learn a new craft or spending time in nature are all meditations that bring me back to myself.
I thank those vampires, they were my teachers...