PURPOSE, AMBITION, HOPE AND FAITH

 

If I were being completely honest, I have started to wonder whether my purpose was ever really mine.

Maybe some of us are born carrying things we never consciously chose. Expectations. Dreams. Possibilities. A quiet sense that there is somewhere we are supposed to arrive, something we are supposed to become, something that will eventually make all of this make sense.

For a long time, I thought I knew what mine was.

Maybe it was to give those around me something to believe in. A reason to keep hoping. Something to look forward to. Perhaps my ambition became a kind of borrowed ambition, one that gave purpose not only to me, but to the people watching, waiting, praying, and believing alongside me.

And I have always found something beautiful about people who pray.

There is something about faith that keeps a person moving when there is very little evidence that anything is changing. Hope can be strange like that. It does not necessarily need proof. Sometimes it simply needs tomorrow.

But then you get older.

And so do the people around you.

Time becomes less abstract. You start noticing things you once ignored. The passing of years. The absence of people who were once here. The quiet changes in familiar faces. The conversations that become more meaningful because you suddenly understand that there may not be an endless supply of them.

You realise, perhaps for the first time, that we are all moving towards the same ending.

No one gets out of this world alive.

And somehow, knowing that makes everything feel heavier.

The ambitions. The plans. The things I thought I would have accomplished by now. The person I imagined I would become. Even the destiny I once believed was waiting for me somewhere ahead.

What if it was never destiny?

What if it was simply something I needed to believe in so that I could keep moving?

Or perhaps it was real, but I took a wrong turn somewhere. Perhaps I am still walking towards it. Perhaps there is no destination at all.

People start leaving this world, and suddenly the questions become less philosophical.

What have I actually done?

What am I still waiting for?

How much time is left?

And why does it sometimes feel as though I have spent so much of my life preparing to live, that I forgot to actually live?

Still, I find myself hoping.

Maybe that is the strange thing about faith. Even when reality becomes difficult to look at, some small part of you continues to believe there is more.

Maybe there is another chapter.

Another beginning.

Another life.

Maybe all the things I could not become here will make sense somewhere else. Maybe the things I could not finish were never meant to be finished. Maybe purpose is not always something we achieve. Maybe sometimes it is simply what keeps us going.

And if there is nothing beyond this?

Then perhaps that is the most frightening possibility of all.

That we arrive, we love, we hope, we struggle, we pray, we become, we lose, and eventually we disappear.

Maybe that is all there is.

Or maybe it isn’t.

For now, I think I will keep the uncertainty.

I will keep the faith.

I will keep hoping that there is something beyond what I can see.

Because perhaps hope itself is a kind of purpose.

And perhaps, for some of us, that is enough to keep walking until the lights go off.