Each day that passes off the calendar means one less day from that total. You’re not here forever; there’s a window of opportunity in life, which is life itself. And that window closes a little with each exhalation of breath. I don’t say all this to scare you, but to alert you to the fact that time is passing away and, if you’re not yet doing what you’re really here to do, what are you waiting for? It’s high time that you get on with living the purpose of you’re life that you came to this planet to live.
You certainly left your mother’s womb naked in body, but you brought with you a genetic code inherited from your parents and, to a lesser degree, from their parents as well. You were also born with certain tendencies, talents, gifts that were intended not so much to amuse yourself on a Saturday afternoon as a hobby to unwind from a rough work week doing something that you really wouldn’t do if you were retired or didn’t need the money. You were given these God-given talents to make the world a better place, to bring the world your very best with these skills you were born with. Doing anything less means depriving the world of your best.
But this is not the case: the majority of people in the industrialized world do not do what they enjoy for a living. It’s fear, of course, that prevents so many of these people from taking what they love to do and bringing that to the world for a livelihood, or more precisely, a lovelihood.
One of the most powerful ways to gain access to what you really want to do in life is to do an exercise I have my students do in my “How to Discover & Live Your Purpose” workshop. It’s called “Write your Obituary.” While the word obituary puts an even deeper fear into their hearts than doing what they love to pay their bills, the exercise can work wonders.
It’s true that most people won’t have an obituary written for them after their deaths, unless their well known in the world, but writing your own obituary will give you the opportunity to see what you really want to do in life, what’s really important to you. Do you want that obituary to say that you labored for forty-five years in a career that means little to you at best, or that you hated at worst? Do you want this obituary to indicate that you never did the things that stirred your soul? This question, of course, is rhetorical, but one thing about it is clear: it forces you to begin thinking about what you want to start doing in life that would make your life one that’s truly worth living, one that gets you up enthusiastically every morning to do what brings you joy and fulfills the meaning of your existence.
The obituary will help you see what you’re doing that’s inconsistent with your true purpose. And it will inspire you to change what you’re doing so that you can be on purpose. And that doesn’t just mean the thing that you do to pay your bills. You may need a gradual change in that part of your life: like Rome, a business wasn’t built in a day.
Does your obituary include any mention of your spiritual development? It should. To be truly on purpose you also need to get on with spiritual realization - the primary reason that you came to this planet is for you to realize your oneness with the Creator of this planet. So find something to help you wake up spiritually - be it meditation, Yoga, Tai Chi, or the esoteric inner truths of your religion.
Now that the obituary inspires you, start today by taking steps to make what you wrote what you do. You have a gap between your current reality and the life that you aspire to as recorded in your obituary. If you start closing that gap your life will become so much more exciting, and so much more fulfilling. It’s the life you were truly born to live.