To Find Purpose Follow Your Heart

Theme video: Follow Your Heart

There are 24 things I try to do each day, and they are:

• Metta (loving kindness meditation)
• Drink a glass of fresh water upon rising
• Touch my yoga mat
• Bathe
• Breakfast
• Take 10,000 steps
• Plan my day
• Remember my purpose
• Visualize my success
• Say no
• Single task
• Value my time
• Delegate
• Listen
• Show gratitude
• Breathe deeply
• Take a lunch break
• Spend time with friends
• Give
• Learn
• Enjoy family
• Have fun
• Meditate
• Sleep eight hours

I'm always making lists like this and trying new approaches to what I think of as the good life. This latest list I generated from a blog post about 15 things successful entrepreneurs do each day, and the rest came from a book I'm reading called The Sweet Spot, which is about living the digital life without going crazy and physically falling apart.

Some of these things are easy to do (learning), and some are difficult (listening), but today I'm thinking about purpose. It makes sense to me that a conscious sense of purpose helps us fulfill the heart's desire.

A sense of purpose undoubtedly provides parameters that organize and contain so, you know, we're not "all over the place." Lists, like the one above, help keep me healthy in preparation for my greater purpose. Your list, of course, will be different. I suggest you have one.

To be effective, to be a felt sense of, your purpose has to be true, relevant, and meaningful. Ahhh: I breathe deeply just thinking about the juiciness of truth, relevance, and meaning. I want to sit down in the mud and start to dig in.

What is my purpose? I know I'm here to cover my expenses and care for my family; these are things I know for sure.

I'm sure we're all aware that a truthful, relevant, and meaningful sense of purpose can be elusive (like bonefish).

Most people have to cover their expenses and many believe they have at least some responsibility to care for their families. My proposed purpose in life is relevant and meaningful.

And yet it's not quite true.

Something is missing. What is it?

I want to write something so beautiful it actually breaks your heart and you remember it forever.

Or maybe not.

Whenever I consider deeper questions, like purpose, I contend with what I think I should want, what I think other people think I should want, and what I truly do want.

Once, a meditation teacher told a group of us, "The human heart wants peace." Very different from wanting to write something so beautiful it actually breaks your heart and you remember it forever.

I try to dig past the shoulds to the truth of my heart's desire. Maybe what I actually want is a soft bed and a long rest. I doubt it. My bias is that we all want something bigger, even if it's something simple, yet elusive, like to love with the whole heart.

Then, too, there is the question of whether your heart's desire is feasible. We're all born with certain advantages, and the attendant disadvantages, of place, time, culture, biology, and more. What to do when you're curvy, five feet tall, and have no turnout? Will the heart desire a career as a ballerina and, if so, what then? Will it be enough to soar through your own lamplit living room, rugs removed?

My personal theory, perhaps delusionally optimistic, is that your heart desires a purpose that requires the very best of you, a stretch towards the divine, but is not impossible.

My bias is that feasibility should be among the least of your concerns. Use that worry to consider how you will take steps, each day, towards fulfilling your purpose. As says the Bhagavad Gita, do not concern yourself with the fruits of you labor.

Speaking of bias, I doubt the heart desires a purpose that harms. While you're fulfilling your purpose, question whether it is in harmony with nature.

I think purpose emerges through courageous listening. Listen to the heart's desire: listen past accident of birth and judgments. Even if for whatever reason you don't follow your heart, be brave enough to know what it wants.