How Our Struggles Shape Our Purpose

Walking along my spiritual path, I have come to believe certain truths about the world. One of those truths is that seemingly small details can hold significant importance in your life. Even the little things have purpose. However, sometimes it is difficult for me to distinguish between the things that are important and the things that are not.

I have a pretty vivid imagination and often, I seek the truth by replaying my experiences over and over again in my mind. Attempting to imagine different perspectives and explanations for what happens in my life, I daydream about the details and try to extrapolate meaning from them. Still, I don’t understand it all, which can be frustrating.

That is why I write this post today. I want to talk about a few of the struggles I have been through and share how they helped me grow to find purpose here on Earth.

Craving Purpose

The hardest part of my journey so far has been this intense feeling of separation between myself and an elusive feeling which I have longed to feel my entire life. If you had to give that feeling a name, I suppose it would be purpose. I’ve wanted to know that life is not just a grand experiment in chaos, despite how it may seem.

You could say that I’ve held a longing for it to all make sense. I wish for an order, a reason, a meaning behind ALL the things that happen in this world, even the bad things. I wish for all creation, including myself, to serve a purpose.

Working in Divine Order

Imagine that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything happens for a reason. Everything works in accordance to a divine plan meant to help us reach a higher state of understanding, connection, and enlightenment. It is all there to propel your soul further into becoming the person you are meant to be.

When a song plays on the radio, that is the song I am meant to hear in that moment. Perhaps it holds a small message message of truth for me. If I were to get fired from a job, it would be because I am being called to do something different. When friendships split in two different directions, I can choose to believe it is simply because our higher purposes are going in opposite directions. Neither way is wrong, we’re just going different ways.

Ultimately, everything means something and nothing is left out. Our higher-selves, God, the universe, what-have-you, decided that these struggles are going to happen at these particular times to further our evolution. We have to take our own paths, because there is absolutely no other way. What an exciting thought (despite being incredibly human in nature)!

I have had moments where I was exploding with feelings of meaning and purpose. I have also felt completely devoid of it during low periods in my life. Over time, I became certain that purpose was something I wanted to chase, and I wanted to help others on similar journey. Yet, I was ignorant to the magnitude of my revelation. I had to take a step back to understand my own purpose, do the work within myself first, before I could help anyone else.

Accepting Your Purpose Is Not Easy

The thing is, not everybody wants to share in a purpose-driven reality. Certainly I have wanted to “opt-out” on a few occasions. If everything in life has a purpose then we must accept the very large and terrible responsibility of learning from our mistakes to fulfill these purposes. So, people become complacent repeating the same mistake time and time again, patting themselves on the back. They tell themselves that nothing really matters.

Once this happens, people tend to start believing that everything is being DONE to them, and they cannot do anything to take charge of their own lives. They are but a subject to the whims of a cruel and unfair universe. When something bad happens, it is not a tool for them to learn and grow from. Instead, it is an incredible wrongdoing being perpetuated against them.

Sound familiar? If so, that is okay! Finding and accepting our purposes in life is difficult because it means we must deeply confront ourselves, and that is hard!

Bad Things Happen

The primary argument against a purpose-driven reality is that really, really bad things happen. For those things, I truly sympathize. What could be the purpose behind 9/11? Childhood cancer? A mother dying in birth? Losing your parents? Young children being shot and killed in schools? There are a multitude of horrendous things going on at any given time during life. I lost my beautiful grandmother earlier this year, and I see no damn purpose for that.

The only real answer here is that hard times make us appreciate the good times. Light implies dark. Perhaps when a person dies, it can be interpreted as them having had their purpose fulfilled, because they were able to change the lives of the people around them (both in life and in death). Life is a dance we dance with ourselves, the universe, and the people around us. All is one.

Thus, the purpose becomes learning from others, the universe, and yourself (over and over again, until it all really sticks together).

A Better World

Death is an unfortunate certainty in our reality. That is what haunts us and makes us question our existence and the existence of a higher-power. Also, as humans, we learn to take things for granted. We stop reaching out to serve our families and community until we understand how quickly they can be gone. We fill our lives with a false sense of purpose, given to us from our careers, status, wealth, or fame. Clinging to our powerlessness, we resign ourselves to the belief that there is simply nothing we can do about the bad things in our world.

If we could work on changing this hard truth, perhaps there would be less tragedy overall. We would not need struggles in order to appreciate what we have. Children would grow to adults who value life. Religions would not persecute each other, but instead live in harmony with the knowledge that we are all in this journey together, perhaps just taking different paths.

The closer we come to understanding our true purpose as individuals and as a collective, the closer we come to making a more peaceful Earth.

Hardship Develops Purpose

There will never not be hardships. I know this because, especially in the last four years, I experienced PLENTY of it. I have hit rock bottom, gotten back up, and fallen right back down. Like, sometimes, actually on the ground. I have been in legal trouble, hospitalized, homeless, jobless… speechless to explain it all. But in dark there is light, and in struggle there is strength.

These were all things that I had to experience in order to learn more about myself. I had to realize how I was influencing my own life, often for the worse. It was time for me to take responsibility and recognize my own purpose, and I couldn’t do so unless I experienced how difficult this life can become. Knowing how quickly things can change for the worse, and learning to appreciate when things are good.

My Purpose

I understand now that I was meant to hit the bottom so that I can help others going through the same thing. Having gone through similar struggles, I can relate to people in a unique way that perhaps others might not be able to.

Your purpose may be different. Do you know what it is? I believe that we all have at least one, but typically we have many.

Have you learned from the hardships in your life and what they meant for your personal development? If you haven’t, I am certain that you will. That is what life does. It has a purpose for everything and perfect timing to serve it.

On Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz

Further Reading

https://phys.org/news/2022-04-hardship-early-life-entrepreneurship-adulthood.html

https://studyfinds.org/lifes-hardships-impact-your-wellbeing-even-decades-later-study-finds/

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