For many years, each year during the New Year’s holiday, I have enacted a private ritual. I take a day (or several days) of silence to reflect on where I’m at and where I’m going. I meditate; I write in my journal; and I consider my intentions for the year to come. I spend time in front of my bookshelves, considering what I feel drawn to reading (or re-reading) at this time. I make lists. I reflect on the people I love, on the state of our world, and on the places where I still get caught in reactivity and illusion.
There is no prescribed structure to this retreat beyond the simple intention to listen carefully to what is true in my experience.
One thing I do not do is make New Year’s resolutions. Over the years, I’ve learned that the most meaningful shifts in my life rarely come from acts of will. They come, instead, from attunement—from making space for whatever wants to emerge.
This year, a simple question quietly formed in my mind: What was the purpose of this day of retreat? As I began to write about this, I recognized that this was actually not such a simple question. The first question unfolded, almost immediately, into a deeper inquiry: What is life for?
I have found this contemplation of purpose very illuminating. As I sat with these questions, one of the first things that became clear was that “purpose” carries multiple meanings and connotations. It can refer to the function of something—what it is for, or why it was done. It can also point to resolve or intention: the inner stance we bring to our actions. Sitting with these layers, I began to notice how purpose lives me: what it means to me now, what it used to mean, and how it has quietly shaped my life.
As I inquired deeply about what purpose means to me, I also came to see that awareness of purpose was a good foundational framework for helping me clarify and align with my intentions and priorities.
By engaging with this inquiry, I hope readers may come away with greater clarity about their own aims and directions. Through simply bringing attention to how purpose lives in us, we can begin to define a living orientation—one that reflects the ways we do, or sometimes don’t, embody our deepest intentions.
Purpose and Meaning
Purpose is not an abstract or cosmic question. It shows up in the choices of daily life—in how we choose to spend time, in what we commit ourselves to, and in how we choose to respond in any given situation.
I have long resonated with Viktor Frankl’s view that meaning is not something we discover once and for all, but something we discern in relation to the specific circumstances of our lives. Meaning, in this sense, is situational. It arises from becoming aware of the possibilities for response that exist here, now, in this life, as it is actually being lived.
From this perspective, purpose is not a fixed answer. It is a way of making meaning; for making sense of what is happening for us.
Traditional Answers to the Question of Purpose
One enduring view holds that the purpose of life is to fulfill one’s given nature. In Western philosophy, this idea is often traced back to Aristotle, whose notion of telos suggests that living beings have an inherent direction toward full realization. In more modern psychological language, this view finds expression in humanistic psychology—in the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others—for whom life is about self-actualization: the unfolding of one’s inherent capacities.
A similar idea appears in biological and evolutionary frames. From this perspective, life is organized around the expression of genetic information, and purpose can be understood as aligning with the blueprint encoded in our DNA. In theological terms, this view translates into the idea that our purpose is to become what God has created us to be.
I have found it valuable to entertain each of these perspectives views on purpose. Each validates the powerful intuition that one’s life is not random, and that our task is to realize what is latent within us. And yet, these ideas of purpose do not fully resolve for me the question of what life is for, nor what we are meant to do.
Purpose and Existential Choice
Existential philosophy takes a different stance. Rather than assuming a pre-given essence, existential thinkers argue that meaning and purpose are not discovered but created. We are not born knowing what our lives are for; we must shape that understanding through the choices we make and the values we enact.
I have long found this view compelling. How we understand our purpose depends on our beliefs, our values, our cultural inheritance, and our personal history. There is no single answer that applies universally. Each life must be lived from the inside.
I do not mean to imply that finding purpose comes about only as a result of conscious inquiry about it. While some people feel a sense of calling to their purpose in living, many others seem to just stumble along, defining their path along the way. Our notions about our purpose in living cannot be defined in any frame which is linear, constant, or exclusively cognitive. While it is useful to have a clear, long-term vision of the road ahead, it is also important to make space for the changing views we encounter along the way.
Purpose and one’s “Life Project”
You cannot inquire deeply about your purpose or how you define the meaning of life without encountering your ideas about who you are. To ask What is my life for? is also to ask Who am I meant to become? Over the years, this inquiry took form for me as a slightly different question: What is a Marjorie for?
During our formative years, purpose and identity tend to be closely interwoven, evolving in response to the basic question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I think that the term “life project” best describes this concept of purpose:
“A personal, long-term plan that integrates an individual’s goals, values and aspirations into a coherent vision for their future, providing purpose, direction, and meaning by guiding decisions and actions, and serving as a prospective narrative for personal growth and development”[i]
Embedded within this notion of purpose is the unspoken template of life as a project: something to be managed, shaped, and brought to a successful conclusion.
My life-project directed my energies toward study, teaching, writing, psychotherapy, and philosophical inquiry. These commitments, and the skills that I cultivated, shaped my sense of my identity and the path of my life’s journey.
Admittedly, my life project entailed quite a bit of psychological struggle in my efforts to “find myself”. But what in the moment often felt like a circuitous and tortuous path in hindsight reveals itself as a steady movement toward becoming myself. In retrospect, I can see that my life had coherence long before I was consciously aware of it.
What I did not recognize until now is that this notion of purpose, though a necessary stage on the path of life, was not the final chapter.
The Evolving Purpose of Purpose
What is abundantly apparent to me at the present juncture is that my relationship to purpose has slowly but profoundly changed.
For many years, I lived inside the unexamined assumptions of my “life project”: I treated my life as a complex undertaking for which I was fundamentally responsible. My task was to manage it well—to define goals, make plans, and ensure forward movement. Purpose, within this frame, functioned like a mission statement. It provided direction and coherence, but it also reinforced a stance of control.
I was, and still am, a committed worker. But something subtle has shifted. Increasingly, I find that meaning arises less from what I am doing and more from the quality of my presence. This shift has not come from abandoning inquiry, but from engaging it more deeply.
Each new inquiry question that takes hold of me now feels less like a problem to be solved and more like a living process. Once a genuine inquiry begins, it has its own intelligence and its own timing. I sometimes describe inquiry as “getting pregnant with a question.” There is conception, gestation, and—eventually—birth. But none of this unfolds on demand or under my control.
My role is not to direct the unfolding of purpose, but rather to remain receptive to it.
Purpose as a Way of Being
What I have come to understand is this: purpose does not reside solely in what we accomplish or even in who we become. At a deeper level, purpose is expressed through how we live—through the quality of attention, openness, and responsiveness we bring to our lives.
Inquiring Deeply itself has become my central enactment of purpose—not as a tool for arriving somewhere, but as a way of being in relationship with my experience. In this sense, purpose is no longer something I define. It is something I inhabit.
This orientation to purpose is the inverse of managing and making things happen. It privileges process over outcome. From this vantage point, purpose is no longer associated with an endpoint I am trying to reach, but is, rather, a way of participating in what is already coming into being.
Seen in this light, my New Year’s ritual takes on a different meaning. Its purpose is not self-improvement or strategic planning. It is to create space for listening—to attune to dimensions of experience that cannot be accessed through effort alone.
Through the practice of inquiry, I am repeatedly reminded that life has a mind of its own. Meaning emerges not because I impose it, but because I make myself available to it.
The purpose of life is to live.
[i] Google AI