Where does our enthusiasm come from? Is it possible to live without a purpose?

On one occasion, reading something from the writer Mark Twain, I read some lines where he mentioned that the two most important days of our lives are the day we are born and the day we discover why. That is, the day we discover what the true purpose of our life is. Many people live with a sense of inner emptiness. They have their jobs and their families, but they feel incomplete. They lack energy. Their lives have become routine and they are not very clear about where they are going or what their true goal is.

Others, on the other hand, spend their lives avoiding this monotony at all costs, and accumulating experiences, traveling a lot or constantly acquiring material possessions. They hide their lack of vital purpose with a collection of small short-term purposes that, sooner or later, end up being insufficient, generating the same feeling of emptiness.

What then is the life that we are called to live? And how can we identify it? What is my purpose? my life mission.

The answers to these questions are related to a type of "awakening" and a type of openness, an openness to what life offers you and what it expects of you. The first thing we can do to know what our purpose is is to identify what it is that we are passionate about. Passion is a concept that is directly linked to our purpose. However, when people wonder what they are passionate about, many find more than one answer. That is because most understand passion only as a burning desire for something or someone that generates a lot of enthusiasm or pleasure.

For example, you may be passionate about watching the next episode of your favorite series, exercising every morning or meeting friends on Friday nights, or simply spending weekends with the family. How then do we differentiate the passion for what we like from the passion related to our life purpose? There is a key aspect that we must take into account in order to differentiate one thing from the other.

Passion not only comes from what we love, but it also comes from what hurts us the most.

For example, the pain that a person has felt in childhood due to the abandonment of her parents can awaken in her a passion for education and childcare. The pain that a person has felt in her family due to the lack of resources can lead her to feel a fervent desire to help the most disadvantaged people. Pain is a great driver for change. If we never felt pain, we would not have the need to change and evolve.

So living our life purpose has to do with doing what we like as well as connecting with our deepest pain. If we look for the etymology of the word «passion», we find that it comes from the Latin «passio», derived from the verb «pati», which means to suffer or endure. "Passion" comes from the etymological family of "suffer." Following the true purpose of our life implies identifying and properly managing what causes us emotional suffering and being willing to experience situations that can be painful in order to transcend them.

But, for this, we must put aside the expectations of our environment, the preconceptions or beliefs of our system and even of what we believed to be up to that moment. It is about choosing between traveling a well-known path and a thousand times traveled or entering the adventure of discovering who we really are.

And you ? Friend or Friend that you read to us ... Have you already discovered your life purpose?