Living on Purpose

A relatively lazy day and Father's Day found me with free time - after household chores, thoughts on expanding my business, application for a car loan, and a short drive through my picturesque town with my youngest daughter.  I decided to watch a DVD I stumbled across at the library a couple of days ago,  "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

This is an autobiographical account of how utterly dramatically, drastically, and with lightning-quick speed life can change within the parameters of moments.  Jean-Dominique Bauby pushed that velocity envelope at the age of 44 when, as a well liked and valued editor of the high profile "Elle" magazine, he succumbed in life's mid-stride to a rare stroke attacking his brain stem.  Awakening from the  20-day coma to a body completely paralyzed except for his mind and the ocular movement of his left eye, he strained with undaunted effort and spirit to keep alive his wit, style, and impassioned approach to the distinctive quality of his soul.  He continued his grand adventures of this lifetime through his kaleidoscope spectrum of personal imagination and produced the manuscript by using a system of blinking to each letter of the alphabet read to him.

By connecting exquisitely with the vast array of sensations within his memory, he linked not only to himself but to the world around him.  He thrilled to life fully expressed, his children, love, and the passionate embracing of choice and opportunity.  The tale is poignant, bitter sweet, and ineffably overpowering as a testament of conviction for living-on-purpose.

My own minor - by comparison - turmoil in the aftermath of time with a narcissist/psychopath and his dysfunctional clan  left me metaphorically comatose and stuck in a murky purgatory of static existence.  Dragging my battered heart, beliefs, and antiquated carcass into a wake-up mode has been an excruciating process of reconnecting to this life.  Where once I held impassioned views on interactions, my self-protected cessation of hope and expectation crippled my grip on forging my own role in this experience of metabolic vitality.

Tony Robbins likes to say that man will act more diligently and exert more effort to avoid pain than he will to consciously magnetize pleasure.  I find that I personally can agree with this, especially when the anguish comes expressly through the torment of the soul.  When beliefs and one's stability of data on individual purpose are shaken to the core, life takes on a mechanical rhythm - much like the life-support for Bauby.  The continuum of subsistence shrinks to a very narrow band width and with it, the capabilities of a blossoming presence falter and lay stunned.

After the trigger of a cascade of ideas found in the movie, I wondered "what kept me moving, always with optimism in my past" - before the violation of my spirit?  What had left me as a lump of clay?  Was it because I accepted the thought that it was "my choice"?  I believe I chose to see goodness...I chose to be upbeat in expectation.  Now I choose to limit my exposure to self-doubt and anger. Unpleasant, detrimental, and even life-altering deviations from one's path do occur.  BUT...

At some point, we can see and feel that each of us are "worthy" of other adventures...higher tone journeys.  Those which produce expanded and uplifting proficiency.  I also watched "Alien Hunter" this weekend and was moved by the characters portraying wounded people who, for the most part, rose to the occasion of greatness in decency.  There, of course, was a renegade being who catapulted wildly in fear and the attempt to escape a doomsday scenario.  But on the whole, the staff of the locked-down research facility, who had unwittingly opened a plague that could wipe humanity from the Earth, were honorable and aware of a mandatory sacrifice.  In the final scenes, the remaining few were "rescued" by other-worldly presences and we are left hoping that their new trek will be exciting, challenging, and filled with the joy of their uncharted next adventure.

In both of these movies a fear of the unknown reigns.  However, overcoming that emotion, valiantly rides honor and the choice to make a positive difference.  This may well be our purpose.  It isn't what we do so much as the spirit of integrity that accompanies our actions.  Claude Bristol's The Magic of Believing is true.  So, for me, I will pretend that I am following my purpose of being until I recognize that this is, indeed, the case.  As Bristol states, "to win, you've got to stay in the game."