Pursuing Freedom Without a Purpose and a Plan
I spent a lot of years, even a few decades, feeling like I was wasting so much of my life, particularly in regards to my work.
I entered adulthood without a real plan. I was one of those kids who was just ready to be liberated from school so I could do what I wanted with my time without schedules and assignments and authoritarians. While many of my classmates were preparing for college, or the military, I just wanted freedom.
Freedom from doing things I didn’t want to do.
Freedom from authority, being told by others how to spend my time and how not to spend my time.
What I understand, now, looking back over 36 years of adulthood, is that the pursuit of freedom without a purpose and a plan is really a path to a form of imprisonment.
That’s how I entered adulthood. With the pursuit of freedom, without a plan.
Along with freedom, I wanted financial comfort and to do meaningful work, work that emerged from the core of my being with duties and tasks and responsibilities that flowed through, and out of me, naturally and left me fulfilled and at peace at the end of each day.
It didn’t take long to learn that all of the things I really desired required a clear understanding of the purpose for which I was born into the world, and a plan to live out of that purpose.
I had lost sight of my purpose by the time I reached adulthood. As a result, the only plan I had was to cover my bills for another month. And since I didn’t have a plan, I found myself in whatever jobs I could find that would cover those bills. Being trapped, imprisoned if you will, in those jobs meant I spent 1/3 of my life, every day, for decades, doing three things:
Following schedules for my life created by other people.
Completing assignments I didn’t want to do.
Obeying the directives of other people about how to spend my time and how not to spend my time.
My pursuit of freedom, without a purpose or a plan, led me directly to a life controlled by other people and circumstances.
I ended up doing well financially and enjoyed promotions to executive positions in those prison cells. But they were prison cells nonetheless.
I spent 33 years in that dreadful captivity. And I, and I alone, was responsible for that imprisonment.
It’s been just in the last three years or so that I’ve remembered who I really am, rediscovered the reason I was born into this world, and began creating and deliberately following plans to live my life, fully, out of those two things: Who I am, and why I am here.
I’m writing this today, blanketed with a feeling of calm, peace, and yes, freedom, reflecting on over 1,400 people so far whose life and work has been positively impacted over the past 18 months or so, because I chose to live a life of purpose instead of elusive indulgence.
Oh, and ironically, I’ve also come to understand that nothing in those decades of imprisonment was a waste. In fact, I couldn’t be living as I live today, and am planning to live in the future, without those misspent years. I’ll talk about that in another post.