The important thing is not to stop questioning.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
The hunger for questioning, from our first moments of awareness to our last, perfectly illustrates the attitude toward inquiry that lies at the root of purpose. Asking questions of ourselves, letting our life question us, maintaining curiosity about who we are and why we’re here—all of this helps enable us to keep the power of purpose alive in our lives from cradle to grave. It’s the process Richard employs to help people live within the larger questions of their lives. It’s the perspective Dave likes to share when people ask him what he teaches. His answer: “Philosophy—no answers, just questions.”
The content of our questions tends to change over the course of our lives. In the first half, a key purpose question is How can I survive? We wonder primarily about our making a living and how purpose may support that. In the second half of our lives, a key purpose question shifts to How can I thrive? Here, we transition from a success agenda to a significance agenda. Our focus shifts from success to relevance. Both of these reflections are essential to growth, and to unlocking a sense of purpose throughout our lives. If we’re growing, whether pushed by pain or pulled by possibility, we’re nudged to live in the larger questions. Not to do so is to be at the mercy of living inauthentically, adopting someone else’s purpose as our own.
Following one of his public presentations, a participant asked Richard, “Why should I keep asking questions?” Richard’s answer: “Because you might be living someone else’s life if you don’t.” The participant continued: “But why does that matter just so long as I’m happy?” That’s certainly a fair response, but as Richard explained—and as we explore in this book—key questions like “What is my reason to rise?” are fundamental to sustained happiness as well as to health, healing, and longevity. The answers to such questions will of course play out differently for everyone. We each have our own answers, our own destiny, our own purpose. Each of us is an experiment of one. But the more we live in the larger questions of life, and the more honestly we answer them, the more we will experience our lives as meaningful.
With this in mind, consider the following purpose questions intended to help you unlock your purpose. Again, later in this book there are opportunities to identify your own statement of purpose, but by reflecting on these questions, you will be better prepared to do so. Ideally, you might engage in this reflection with another person, a “purpose partner” so to speak.
Thoughtful engagement with these questions represents an intuitive, practical way of unlocking your purpose to create meaning in your life.
Answering these questions is important, but what really matters is living them. As the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, we should not expect the answers immediately. We should learn to love the questions and, in doing so, gradually, hardly noticing it, come to live the answers authentically.
Each transition to a new phase of life is accompanied by a time of uncertainty, a liminal period during which we reimagine our lives around a new core question. In fact, these phases may never seem quite predictable and may not follow a plan that we might have imagined or expected. Perhaps, rather than using such words as “developments,” “stages,” or “phases,” we might consider another word: “improvisations.”
Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson observed in her book Composing a Life that the adult years are not linear but fluid and even disjointed. She viewed adult life as “an improvisatory art” combining familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations. One reason for the improvisatory nature of life today may be that a growing number of people are expecting their path to provide their daily meaning as well as their daily bread. They want work that integrates their unique gifts and talents with the practical realities of surviving and making a living. They want purpose and a paycheck.
The college students Dave works with embody this perspective wholeheartedly. In their day-to-day educational pursuits, they consistently question the purpose of the curriculum. They’re not just interested in the what or the how of the material, they also want to know the why. At times this can be exhausting from a teacher’s perspective, but more typically it makes the classroom an exciting environment where authentically curious inquiry takes place. When students understand the why of the material they are exploring, and how it connects to the meaning in their own lives, that’s where the magic happens—for both students and their teachers alike.
This is the case for younger students as well. The eleventh and twelfth graders with whom Dave does philosophy at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle are just like high school students everywhere: they’re distracted by their phones, their friends, and the day-to-day challenges of being an adolescent in the twenty-first century. Exploring philosophical questions in the classroom might be interesting or diverting from time to time, but life consistently gets in the way, and their attention easily goes elsewhere. Except when they have a sense of purpose about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
Case in point: With the help of the classroom teacher with whom he works, Dave put together a team of students to participate in the national High School Ethics Bowl. The students bonded while discussing the intriguing ethical case studies presented to them, but even more, over the shared sense of purpose about why they were doing it. They felt proud to represent their school in an intellectually rigorous competition with other public and private schools in the area—all of which were much better funded and resourced than Rainier Beach High School. During practice sessions for the event, all the students were engaged, involved, and energized; not a phone was in sight, unless it was to look up some relevant information related to the material under examination.
The entire feeling of the classroom changed; instead of the typical high school experience, where students are often just trying to make it through until the end of the day, it became a vibrant laboratory for the exploration of ideas and perspectives. Admittedly, the students’ commitment may have been in part because Dave always brought pizza to the practice sessions, but the main reason was that they drew connections between what they were doing and why they were doing it. Their work together was imbued with a sense of purpose, individually and collectively, and their shared experience became more meaningful and engaging as a result.
Whether we’re teenagers, young adults, or older folks in the later stages of life, the hunger for meaning to be connected with the work we’re doing—whether in school, for a paycheck, or as a volunteer—is deep and abiding. Our ability to improvise, to compose a life, to feed that hunger becomes stronger as we better understand and articulate a sense of purpose. The key to unlocking that sense of purpose lies in our willingness to ask, to answer, and to live our core questions.
The late management consultant Peter Drucker said that the probability the first choice that a person makes about career choice is the right choice is roughly one in a million. He asserted that if a person is fully satisfied with that first choice, it probably means they’re just being lazy. We should not be discouraged by Drucker’s observation, though, because everything we do builds on the foundation of our earlier experiences. Rarely do we have truly wasted effort, although at the time it might seem that way. We’re always growing and mastering life’s lessons—even those involving what to let go of—that move us forward on the purpose quest.
We’re all challenged to improvise and create the specific and unique path we are going to travel. It takes courage to align what we do with who we are. Yet we are often not encouraged to do that. From early childhood most of us are taught to behave in ways that fit the purposes of others. As children, we are naturally open yet dependent on the lead set by our parents, peers, teachers, and others. Following their lead brings approval. Sooner or later, we realize it is easier to base our choices on what is expected of us rather than on what is meaningful to us. Sometimes we become so dependent on these external standards that we no longer know what we truly need or want.
Instead of improvising and taking risks on our own purpose path, many of us postpone and wait for something to happen. We wait for the revelation, when our full gifts and talents will be unleashed and used, not committing ourselves to anything until everything is right. Waiting by its very nature traps us in a way of living that makes our life feel superficial and disappointing. We have stalled on our purpose path. If we do not unlock our purpose, a large portion of each day is spent doing something we might not truly care about and would rather not be doing. We may spend so much of our lives postponing that we miss the true joy of life and remain unfulfilled. The day will come. Death will claim us, and we will not have had more than a moment of contentment.
The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, in his classic work The Denial of Death, asserts that no one is immune to the fear of death and that all of human action is motivated by the desire to ignore or avoid the inevitability of dying. With this in mind, it’s clear that to face death squarely is to face purpose squarely. Mysteriously, the creative spirit of the universe calls us at various times and in various ways to make our own difference in the world—that is, to matter. Look back over the phases of your own life path. What were your questions during each decade of your life? What are your questions today?