In the piece below Nate Kemp, from Life Beyond Logic gives us some simple and specific things to do to get ourselves back onto the life track.
When I was a kid, my parents encouraged me to learn the piano. But for me, playing the piano was about as interesting as watching a congressional debate on CSPAN.
I didn’t want to spend my afternoons learning “Hot Cross Buns” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” I wanted to be outside, making jumps for my bike or learning new tricks on my Rollerblades (believe it or not, that was semi-cool in the late 1980s).
So during the half hour before my weekly lesson, I would try to learn the song my teacher had assigned me. She would show up. And I would then stumble through it until she would cut me off by saying, “you didn’t practice this week. Did you?”
Then something unexpected happened. I was thirteen years old, and I heard a recording of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald singing, “Don’t Mean a Thing, If You Ain’t Got That Swing.” Listening to that song, I had an instant realization: “I want to be a jazz pianist.”
I told my parents about my musical revelation, and they thought I had gone crazy. I was the kid who hated piano lessons, the kid who stumbled through half-memorized songs at each recital. “I really want this,” I told them. “This is different.”
And it was. I became devoted to playing the piano. Five years later, as a college student, I was earning good money playing piano at Nordstroms, restaurants, and jazz clubs.
What changed? I now had a purpose.
Aristotle was no jazz pianist. But he understood the importance of purpose. He talks about it in the very first line of The Ethics: “Every action and moral choice,” he declares, “aims…at some good.”
Aristotle saw that without a clear sense of purpose, our lives become much like my early childhood piano career – undirected and lacking any central focus. We shift aimlessly from one job, relationship, or location to the next.
So for this week’s experiment, let’s explore finding and living out of our deepest sense of purpose.
This is no easy task. People spend thousands of dollars on self-help books and seminars devoted to this subject.
But here are a few steps that might be useful along the way:
Step 1: Finding Your Purpose
In the philosophical tradition, death is the classic tool for finding your sense of purpose. Philosophers like Socrates, Epicurus, and Montaigne knew that the prospect of death focuses the mind, clearing away all that’s irrelevant. So there’s no need to invest hundreds of dollars in self-help books and seminars. All you need to do is meditate on one simple question: “if I were to die next year, what would I want to leave behind?”
Step 2: Clearing out the Roadblocks
Once you have a sense of what you’re here to do, take a close look at all the things stopping you from doing it. Some of this can’t be changed. Children still need to be picked up from school and bills still need to be paid. But you would be surprised how much of our time is spent devoted to activities that have nothing to do with our life’s purpose. Watching TV, surfing the Internet, and shopping for stuff we don’t need – these are just a few of the ways we distract our selves from our deepest purpose.
Step 3: Living It
You know what you want to do here on earth and you know what’s blocking you from doing it. So here’s the final step – live it. This is way harder than steps 1 and 2. Why? Because it requires discipline and devotion. It requires taking risks, saying “no”, and breaking out of time sucking habits.
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