HAPPINESS is sweet and cloying. It is sunshine and roses.
Even if I never got that analogy of roses being all that great, for one, they are so thorny. If anything, happiness as sunshine and roses should be an analogy for purpose.
Purpose is deep. Purpose is about grit. Grit is the new word that determines success. It is the one word that seems to determine if your child will have a future or not.
The funny thing is, you don’t have to be a child grit-bearer to have grit. I got mine in adulthood. I think it is the very challenges of “adulting,” that is, the demand on an adolescent or young individual to fulfill his or her obligations to his or himself and society at large that produce this grit.
Grit isn’t something you are born with. I was a spoiled child in so much as I had all the love I wanted. I never needed anything I didn’t already have or could have and I was happy. Then adulting came, and wreaked havoc on my pretty little world. Then it became a choice: Get some grit, or lose to life.
That is all it is really: Happiness is a choice.
Yet, the more you choose to fight, to be more than you’ve ever been, to heed the call of reality, that’s when you start having grit. You take grit with every step that you take. Like the military, the badges of honor are received after the war, after the fighting, after the mud and blood have all been washed away.
That’s when you can say that you are a champion.
Where is purpose then?
Purpose is your flag across the line of fire. It is the beat of the war drums in your heart that keeps you taking one step after another, even long after your body has been shod with bullets. It is the mad love that drives you to live when all logic of past experience is telling you that you should be dead by now.
Purpose is the soundtrack to your movie. And during your lowest moments, those few strings of music are enough to fill your heart with a fire to carry on.
So, what if you haven’t found happiness?
In the path of life, sometimes all you have to do is follow your duties and desires. That’s right I said duties. Sometimes people think that their purpose is something far away that they have to find.
It’s some rare gem in the middle of the temples of the Tibetan Himalayas or hidden in some Asian continent for white people, and in the heart of a white guy for most Filipinas.
Yet, purpose sometimes can take on the color of your favorite house rag.
Sometimes what we have been used to doing every day for the people we love is part of our purpose. We see it as common place, because we think that purpose is a many feathered rainbow pheasant that flies into our lives and changes everything around us.
The truth is, sometimes it is. But sometimes, purpose comes in solid and somber tones like duty, devotion, loyalty, faithfulness and sacrifice.
That doesn’t sound sexy to the generation that loves selfies and traveling the world, but there it is. Sometimes our purpose is simply to love the people that are closest to us. Sometimes our purpose is defeating the sin that has lived in the dark corners of our families for years. Sometimes it is waging a war against the demons of lust, greed, sloth, selfishness and ego.
If you think that purpose should be unique to you, think about your family and everyone around you. There are reasons that they are “stuck” with a person, such as you. There is something you can offer them that would catapult their growth greatly.
Now some of you are thinking that I’ve digressed. You want to find your purpose, not make other people happy, right? Why am I talking about the needs of others? Shouldn’t it be all about you?
Should it?
It really shouldn’t be all about you. Really. That is what suicidal people have in common. They are stuck in the state of entropy. The vacuum inside their soul is only aware and sucks the life out of them.
Your purpose is to be a gift to this world and, most of all, the people around you.
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Maxine Mamba is a regular contributor to the Millennials page of the BusinessMirror. The views expressed in her column, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the BusinessMirror’s. E-mail her at millennialuniverse@yahoo.com.