Now What?

I've been home from Middlebury officially for two weeks now, though it feels like much longer. I came home without any specific plans for the future, just dreams and ideas. To be honest, I was looking forward to taking some time off after a year of intense stimulation, and the past two weeks have been blessedly relaxing.

The job search goes on, at its own sometimes halting pace. Unlike many of my friends, I did not begin the job search last fall. I asked myself what the worst result of that choice could be, and I saw myself, essentially, in the position that I am in now: living at home and unemployed. I decided that such a position was not necessarily an undesirable one. Being at home has given me the space for various small desires to unbury themselves, although no tidal wave of self-knowledge has washed over me, forcing me to follow one direction over another. My largest desire has been for the past eighteen months, and remains, to return to Italy.

There was a time in July when I began to feel a rushing fear of worthlessness and resentment of what I believed to be my own aimlessness. For a week or so I felt crushed by the weight of my own undiscovered future, frustrated by the simple and undeniable fact that I was no longer climbing an evident ladder toward some tangible goal, as I have been doing for the course of my entire life.

This period of time ended when I read the chapter in A New Earth entitled "Your Outer Purpose." Outer purpose is your role in the outside world and is relatively unimportant. It is to be distinguished from inner purpose, which is your role in the awakening of the universe. Simply put, it is self-realization, dwelling in the state of perpetual peace that most people seek at some level of their consciousness.

The most shocking revelation of the chapter to me was this: your true purpose is whatever you are doing at this moment. Rather than looking away from what you are doing right now, look more deeply into it. I am sitting at my computer typing this post, and so that is my true purpose. Not forever, but for now. When I stand from the chair and leave this room, that will be my purpose. How could it be otherwise?

This simple realization released the pressure that I had placed on myself and opened up the space for new possibilities to arise.