Posted: Nov 19, 07 7:16am

Talk about purpose ... I was reading the posts about finding your purpose and saw the two tests and said to myself, "Myself, I do not think my purpose would be advanced by spending time trying to sort out someone else's definition of purpose."

Purpose, to me, is not a simple and singular concept that can be discovered by taking a test and examining who I admire - whether they existed or not. The best I could come up with is a pre-packaged response that has no relevance to me and would end up only telling me that I define myself through the admiration of someone else. For instance, as a professional writer, I deeply admired the late Norman Mailer - as a writer, not as a person - but I could never write like him and I am happy to have made the journey through life with one wife. I do not believe that six would have been of any benefit to me, nor I to them. I managed to remain sober and I never punched out another person in a restaurant. Some heroes have a great quantity of tarnish on their coat of armor. In some cities, a hero is only a large sandwich!

Purpose is a deep and lingering ideal that sets the tone for the lives of some people. Others are just as happy to read US magazine and take their purpose from the latest shennannigans of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ... or whomsoever you choose as your icon of the moment.

Life, to me, is deeper and more complex than evolving purpose out of the newsworthy icon of the day or even of the century. To find purpose in life, for me it is necessary to believe that my life has a purpose - a destiny - and that purpose is both individual and communal.

If your purpose is to please yourself or enrich yourself, that will define all your actions. If, on the other hand, you feel connected to a greater purpose, then that will define many of your actions because to some degree, we are all self-serving. Even those who get pleasure from serving others wouldn't do it if they didn't get pleasure out of it.

Look back to define your present purpose. What have been the focuses of your life? If you are getting educated, is the purpose to learn or to make money? If you work, are you basically meeting your own needs or do you have a larger and more communal set of goals - along with making money?

If you are in the middle of a career, how do you define success? How do you decide whether to remain at what you are doing?

If you have a family, how do you define where you invest your time and effort? What portion of your being is invested in yourself, what portion in your spouse and what portion in your kids?

I was raised to believe that my overall purpose was to leave the world a better place than I found it ... for my kids and for everyone else as well. How much better? That was left for me to define and how do I serve was also left for me to define.

I chose a wife whose beliefs were aligned with mine. That was a wise decision. We made it through all the small and large traumas together. We lived long enough to lose all our ancestors, amny of our peers and one of our children. My career wound down and my wife's is at its pinnacle so she continues working for a while. We saw our son grow into a professional performer and he raised his daughter in the same direction. We saw him continue to work for the cuases that benefit mankind and our granddaughter do so as well. He also married a woman whose beliefs were aligned with his.

I chose career paths that would never make me rich but would give me suffient funds so I wouldn't have to worry where my next meal was coming from or have to live in a place that wouldn't provide my kids with good educational opportunities. That fit with my goal of making the world a better place. If my kids could have expanded opportunities to do good while making their way in the world, I would be contributing to my goal.

My major career path was using my God-given personal gifts in the field of psychotherapy. By helping others to define their own life paths, I was oriented toward my overall goal of leaving the world a better place than I had found it.

I will never be able to contribute a wing to a hospital or dedicate a university but I helped out people who otherwise would not have made it into universities and got them out of hospitals so maybe a new wing would become redundant.

What has life left me as I turn into the homestretch? Overall, I am satisfied that i have met some of my goals and failed to meet others. I feel I did the right thing more often than not and to quote my favorite journalist, the late Scotty Reston, I comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable as often as I was able.

There is an old joke about the Dole family - the kings of canned fruit: The family forebearer, a minister by trade, went to Hawaii to do good and the family ended up doing well. Did they? What was their definition? I cannot say what they did. I wasn't there. Until rapid shipping allowed us to tase fresh tropical fruit, they gave us the only version we knew.