Our
Purpose
“My
story of success and failure is not about music and being famous. It’s about living
and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.”
Wynonna
Judd
Human
beings are the only animals on planet Earth who want to find meaning in their
existence. Think about that for a minute. There are many animals with bigger
brains than ours—blue whales, dolphins, killer whales, elephants, to name a
few. But they don’t go around wondering what the meaning of life is, or what their
purpose is in the cosmic sense. Only humans do that.
We have
an expectation of what life should be, and we constantly measure ours against
the “norm” to see how we’re shaping up. It seems that no amount of showing us
that life is not like that—that instead, it is unpredictable, random and constantly
changing—causes us to change our expectations. Other mammals just go with the
flow. They live in understandable cycles—birth and childhood, adolescence and
young adulthood, maturity, and so on. They just do what is instinctual to do
and occasionally there is a slight breakthrough, like when chimpanzees learned
to use simple tools to extract food from difficult sources.
Human
beings, on the other hand, have restless minds. We search for our purpose, our
most satisfying partner, job, location, belief. What we find suitable and
useful in any one life stage will likely change in the next. The thing that
distinguishes us from other mammals is that constant searching. In my lifetime
we’ve made amazing discoveries—in everything from pharmaceuticals to space
travel, from party lines to computerized cell phones, from pen and ink to
global internet communications. According to evolution, we started out as
simple animals, but that curious mind pushed us to do audacious things. Steve
Jobs once said, “People who are crazy enough to think they can change the
world are the ones who do.”
Our
curiosity and stretching have led us to question everything, to doubt
everything, and to probe and push and dissect until we have answers. Clearly,
that is our purpose. We are here on this planet to find meaning, to deduce cause
and effect, and to give language to it so that others can understand too. We
are the creatures who were blessed (or cursed) with speech that can be used to
change hearts and minds and can create whatever it can imagine. The push to
learn more and more is so strong in us that each generation produces the next
step.
Imagine
what we could accomplish if we could all just get along.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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