How Do You Ever Know?

Some of us know our mission in life at an early age.  Some of us never know. But if we let ourselves really think about it most of us would realize, in our bellies or in our brains, what we’re meant to do in this life.

Sprite knew at an early age that she was sent to help others.  When she was a freshman in college she worked two or three jobs to earn the money to put herself through school.  She also found time to volunteer at the Minneapolis Crisis Nursery.

The Crisis Nursery is for parents who are in the midst of a crisis and who need to bring their young children to a temporary place of safety.

On one particular day a two-year-old boy was dropped off. He was crying.  The boy was assigned to Sprite, who was asked to help him fall asleep. Sprite was eighteen.  She had never put a toddler to sleep before.  She felt totally unprepared, but let her instincts take over.

Sprite told the little boy a story to calm him.  Then she lay down with him on a cot, held him to her chest, and gently patted his back.  Soon he was asleep.

We’ll never know where the boy came from, or what his life was like after he left the center.  We do know this small slice of his two-year-old life for the few hours while he slept in Sprite’s arms.  And we know something more.

“When he fell asleep in my arms,” Sprite told me, “I knew I had fulfilled my mission.  I had helped another human being and it was all right for me to die.”  As an adult Sprite recognizes that her thought may have been a bit melodramatic, but it was real for her at the time.

My father is almost one-hundred and two years old.  I was with him yesterday at an exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum.  “When people ask me what I do each day,” he said, jokingly, “I tell them that I loaf.”  That’s not quite true.  My dad is thinking all of the time.

Most of us are busy all of the time.  Perhaps we feel that we need to call one more friend, send one more text, or finish just one more project for the day.  Perhaps we are just fending off boredom or unconsciously holding at bay a sense of being useless or unneeded.  Perhaps we need to work two jobs.

But maybe, like my dad, we should allow ourselves the freedom to loaf a bit.  Maybe, like Sprite, we should dedicate ourselves to helping others.

When my first daughter was four she asked, “Why are we here?”

Then she answered her own question.  “I know. To use the earth.”

I’ve thought about this for years, and I have never found a better answer except, perhaps, the answer that Sprite discovered, and lives – to help others.

You might think about what you really want to accomplish in your life. What do you have a deep need to do?  What is your own internal need, rather than the role that has been thrust upon you either by circumstances or by others? I encourage you to live your destiny:  When you do, nothing will stop you.

I was in the audience when a good friend delivered his high school commencement speech.  A woman sitting near me pointed to the speaker and muttered to her companion, “Rabble rouser.  Dangerous.”

Maybe my role is to be a rabble rouser, to get you to think about your life and encourage you to live it to the fullest so that when the time inexorably comes you can say to yourself, with a full heart, “I have fulfilled my mission and now I can die.”

Peace.

Alan