Choosing your life's purpose

Feb. 10, 2011

Dear Julie,

Shel Silverstein's book "The Giving Tree" is about a tree's love for a boy. The boy plays in her limbs and rests in her shade and eats her apples and crowns himself king of the forest with a wreath of her leaves. The boy loves the tree, too. But as time goes by he spends less time playing with the tree, saying he is too old to play with her anymore. Can she give him money to buy things? The tree gives him her apples to sell, and that makes her happy. The boy still stays away, and the tree is sad. When the boy, grown now, tells the tree he needs to build a house for the wife and children he wants, the tree offers him her branches. And the tree is happy.

When the boy, an old man now, returns he is sad and wants a boat to sail away on. Cut me down and build a boat so you will be happy, the tree says.

A long time passes before the frail old man returns. The tree apologizes for having nothing left to give him. Her leaves, her apples, her branches and her trunk are gone. She is only a stump. The old man says all he wants now is a place to rest. Come, says the tree. Sit.

The boy's capacity to return her love didn't matter to the tree. The tree's purpose was to give.

Questions about our own life purpose sometimes can blindside us at 3 a.m. or perhaps while daydreaming over a grilled cheese sandwich. The questions might assume we are born with a life purpose, that in some pre-incarnational existence souls and spirit guides confer and plan the coming lifetime.

Maybe we wanted to experience peace for 90 years. How would we make that happen? We might not join the Marines or become a prizefighter. We might not even join the Peace Corps. We might do something that has nothing directly to do with peace. Instead, whatever we would do we would try to do peacefully. We could be a peaceful bookkeeper, a peaceful salesman, a peaceful heavy equipment operator. Peace is not what but how.

This presumes our life purpose is a kind of destiny. But can a life purpose be whatever we want it to be? Can we choose, right now?

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the "Conversations with God" books, says your life purpose isn't discovered but created. "It's your heart's desire."

If so, what do you choose? What are worthy life purposes? We could look at the Seven Deadly Sins -- lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride -- and choose their opposites. All are rooted in fears that love can overcome.

What else? Wisdom? Self-acceptance? Joyfulness? Healing?

Whatever you choose, what if today you began to live your life on purpose? If every decision you make each day, from what to make for breakfast to the way you drive to your interactions with your family and friends and co-workers, is based on sharing yourself with them?

And whatever you choose, would you choose to live your purpose no matter what? No doubt some of her fellow trees who weren't as giving had some opinions for the Giving Tree, how she needed to send a hard rain of apples on that boy's head and stop being a doormat.

Like the tree, you could choose to be giving no matter what. To be willing to say yes no matter what.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.