What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

What is your life purpose?

My sister Christine and I posing in a photographer's studio in the mid-1950s, before I grew up to be a potato sorter, among other things! I'm on the left.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

How often were you asked this question when you were young?

The first time you were asked it you were probably so young that all you could do was stand there with an open mouth, struggling with the concept of being grown up. It seemed such a far-away thing. But as you grew older you got the idea that all the questioner wanted you to say was something specific, like chicken raiser or chocolate maker, forklift driver or fireman, water diviner or wellness coach.

Answers like these would make the questioner happy because it meant you had a focus.

You knew what you were going to be.

The questioner could relax because you knew what your life’s purpose was.

Initially, my favourite answer was that I wanted to be a private secretary, but only because my mother believed this was the ultimate thing for a young woman to be. As I got older, I thought about being an air hostess, but I was too short; a nurse, but I didn’t like dealing with queasy body liquids; a teacher, but I didn’t have the patience. The private secretary idea never eventuated either because my telephone etiquette was minimal, my typing skills minuscule, and I didn’t like being told what to do.

So, what did I become when I grew up?

Well, like most people, I became lots of things.

Janitor. Library assistant. Sub-editor. Community radio presenter. Proof-reader. Tax avoider. Potato sorter. Author. Barista. Bookshop salesperson. Social services coordinator for people with dementia.

All the things I became were interesting, especially that brief stint of being a potato sorter, but I often wondered if the things I was being and doing were my life’s purpose. Or was there more to me than that?

Throughout my life, was there something else I was being at the same time?

These questions bring me to birthday parties.

Birthday Parties

The cake with the required number of lit candles is in front of me, and family and friends are smiling and singing the Happy Birthday song. As I look around I sense that an unchanging part of myself, which has been with me since my birth and has been present at all 71 of my birthday parties, is using my eyes to look out at the world and the people around me.

What is looking out is not my personality, my problems, or my position in society.

It is my deeper self, my changelessness, my soul.

And I realise once again that no matter what label I give myself and whatever job I am doing, I am always this presence that I am sensing strongly right now.

Eckhart Tolle in Oneness With All Life:

Your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Inner purpose concerns Being and is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary.

He further defines our inner, primary purpose in a video clip.

To be a vehicle for consciousness to come into this world.

A Vehicle for Consciousness

What I sense, as the Happy Birthday song resounds around the room, is the consciousness that is always present, and I’m reminded that that is what I came here to be, as well as all those other things.

But being a vehicle for consciousness is the most valuable, the most interesting and the most lasting.

That is why you and I are here on earth.

Let's be a vehicle for consciousness today.

With love, Marlane