Feel Your Purpose

My co-teacher, Davide, proposed that purpose is not something we have to find. We already have a purpose; by virtue of our existence, by our very nature, we are endowed with purpose. Everything and everyone has purpose.

He said: think of a beautiful place you know in nature, a river, forest, mountain or plain. Think of how every piece of that scene plays a role. We don’t demand that the tree declare its purpose. We intuitively feel that even a stone has a purpose. We can use the same intuition to see our own role and feel our own purpose.

Really? The class wondered, does a stone have a purpose? An inert, lifeless piece of rock?

The purpose of a simple stone may not be readily apparent. But if we take a moment to understand its role in the Earth’s long life and its relationship to living creatures, the stone gains meaning.

As you hold a stone in your hand, think of it as part of the Earth’s skin. Beneath its rocky crust, our Earth gets pretty hot; there’s molten iron just twenty miles under our feet. Further inside, a mix of metals churn in huge, tumultuous waves. We can thank the stones of the crust for standing between us and a fiery fate.

The stones of our planet also help create its uniquely breathable atmosphere. We take 23,000 breaths a day, and this couldn’t happen without the minerals that stones carry.

How do stones help us breathe? Through the millenia, they are ground up by glaciers or worn down by rivers to travel into the ocean, where they nourish the two million species of oxygen-producing algae called diatoms.

Diatoms miraculously produce up to half the oxygen we breath, and they couldn’t exist without their beautiful, glasslike shells, made of silica, the nourishment gleaned from stones.

Here’s a photo of some diatom shells.

And the role of the stones doesn’t end there.

The silica in stones travels around the Earth in a cycle. Over millions of years, the shells of dead diatoms coat the ocean floor, dry to become sandy deserts, fly through the air and over the ocean in giant dust storms, and nourish the Amazon rain forest, the lungs of the Earth. The rainforest in turn produces clouds which rain into rivers, which run over more rocks, bringing their minerals back to the sea to nourish more diatoms.

And on and on. The stone of the Earth travels from glacier to ocean, desert to sky, through hundreds of millions of years, providing the minerals essential to life and breath. Stones bind every element of the planet together. They seem to have a purpose.

, , , -

Does the stone in your hand seem different now?

Like a simple stone, each of us exists in an invisible web of interconnectedness. To feel it, bring to mind the many ways you benefit other people each day, and how those benefits unfold to still others, over the years and decades.

Also, bring to mind the many people whose actions benefit you every day, the many you know, and the many you cannot know, back into time unrecorded.

Envision how you are embedded in a flow of mutuality, extensive beyond imagination, influencing you and, in turn, influenced by you.

Human connectedness, like the silica cycle of the Earth, supports all of us in the intricate dance of existence. Each one of us has a role and a purpose. Though you may not be able to define it in a sentence, you can feel it every day.

Subscribe to our newsletter and blog here.