Imagine being born with a little white card that tells you exactly why you’re here.

Your Unique Thing.

Your purpose, your calling, your power, conveniently written down, next to your name.

So you know, right from the start.

Sometimes I wish life works that way.

Things would be so much easier.

Most of the time I don’t.

But not because I love looking for My Thing so much.

Now and then I ask people if they’d like to know about their future from that moment on, in detail, from day to day until they die.

Nobody has ever said ‘Yes!’ to that question.

In a way, we’d love to know, but in more ways, we don’t.

What we fear so much about life is also what makes it so valuable and interesting and exciting.

Uncertainty scares the shit out of us, AND it drives us, inspires us, and stimulates us.

I know that finding your unique guiding compass, Your Thing, is not a universal riddle that we all have to solve.

I know that many people are not interested in a lofty thing like that, sometimes because they simply don’t have the time, the circumstances, or the peace of mind to contemplate it.

I have the time, though.

And, boy, did I throw handfuls of it at finding my purpose, My Thing!

At the age of 54, I still don’t really know what it is.

Looking back at my various careers there have always been themes.

Creation.

Words.

Soothing.

Comforting.

Simplifying stuff.

And making dark and heavy things just a bit lighter.

I’m an entertainer of sorts.

A storyteller.

An explorer and an explainer.

I guess that, with everything I did and still do, I take away some of the confusion, the fear, the feeling of being lost, and part of the daily gloom that many people experience in their lives.

My theme, my talent, seems to be to express a sense of ‘Yeah it sucks and it’s really difficult, but it will be okay, okay?’.

It’s not nearly as big as I’d like it to be (so it would make me really special), but way more casual.

And I still haven’t been able to put it into a really concrete Thing, the Thing that would have been on my little white card.

But somehow it seems that acting on my inner lightness, the moments of inspiration that lift me up, is exactly what I have to keep doing.

Sharing the invisible lightness of life.

Does that work for you?

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(Photo by @frensisalberti, for Unsplash)