Why Are We Here?

I was talking with a client the other day about that scary question: what is it we are on earth to do? “If only I could discover my reason to be here,” she said, ‘then I’d know how to live.” It’s a useful question to ask, of course, and we probably all should ask it on a regular basis, if only to be able to discount some of the obviously unworthy answers. For example, I’m pretty sure we are not on earth to be unkind to each other, victimize others, and to pollute the planet. This seems reasonable. We are not here to cause chaos and misery. But what are we here for, then? The Dalai Lama says we’re here to be happy, no matter what. And that raises a whole series of questions of its own. So here’s a thought: to some extent we can never ‘know’ what we’re here on earth to do just as an inventor can’t know which solution will work for his invention until he’s tried a whole lot of possibilities. To ask for the answer, first, is actually to pose the wrong question. Our lives are ours to live, and during the course of them it seems we are invited to look closely at who we are and at the nature of the world, so we can uncover what it is we are ’supposed’ to do. This means listening to our lives. It means we don’t know, and can’t know precisely where we are going in our personal trajectories, and it means we have to keep on doing so in faith. We have to turn up every day and look at the growing plant of our lives, and as it grows and unfolds we’ll see what sort of flowers it has. But we have to keep turning up in order to see that. If we have ‘purpose’ it might have less to do with what we actually achieve, and a lot more to do with the way we access our faith and keep on doing what, in our best estimation, is our life’s work. Perhaps our life’s work is to be faithful. ‘All paths are the same. They all lead nowhere.’ so said Castaneda’s holy man Don Juan. It’s not where we get to, it’s how we live as we do so that matters, because even if the path is an illusion, the experience of being on the path is not.