Purpose

Try to gather your mind together right now. Whatever it’s been thinking about in the course of the morning, just put it aside. Focus in on the breath. Be aware of the breath all the way in, all the way out. Start with some long breathing. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, deeper, faster, slower. Try to see what your body needs in terms of the breath right now, because the breath is the force of life.

All too often we just let it go on automatic pilot. We have other concerns; we think that other things are more important. But it’s good to be centered in the body and centered in the breath as much as you can. That allows the breath to flow freely through the body. It’s nourishing for the body, and it’s especially nourishing for the mind, because the mind needs a good place to stay. It needs a home.

It spends the day wandering around here, wandering there. If you drew a map of where it’s been in the course of the day, it’d be a big tangle of strings. And when the mind goes out like that, uses up energy. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth it? A lot of our thinking serves no purpose at all. But if we live without a purpose, what kind of life is that?

Think about the Buddha. He was probably the most purposeful person there ever was. He told himself that there must be a true happiness that can be found through human effort, and he was going to find it. Anything that didn’t serve that purpose, he put aside. He even found that living at home was getting in the way, so he left home. And staying focused on his purpose, he found the true happiness he was looking for.

So you want to make sure that you live with a purpose, too. Ask yourself, what is your purpose? What do you hope to accomplish in this lifetime? What do you think you can take with you when you go? You can’t take the body. You can’t take your material possessions. But you do take the qualities of the mind.

So you want to focus on developing good qualities inside: qualities like goodwill, compassion, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. These are things we can develop as we meditate. So we use the breath, we use the body as a way of getting the mind centered, but the focus really is on the mind, what we can do to develop good qualities in the mind that will be our true possessions.

When we develop good qualities, of course, we’re not the only people who benefit. When we’re kind, when we’re generous, when we’re mindful, other people will benefit, too. In this way your goodness spreads around. So you’re serving your purpose and you’re helping other people with their purposes as well, their good purposes.

So it’s always good to think every day when you wake up: What is my purpose today? How does that fit in with the larger purposes of your life? Make sure you’re headed in the right direction, and that your choices follow in that direction as well, day in, day out. Then you have the hope of finding what you truly want. Otherwise, if you let yourself get scattered here, scattered there, you end up with just little bits and pieces of things that are not all that satisfying.

So focus on having a true purpose. Hold to that as your goal, and you’ll find that your life has meaning. A meaningful life is a good life and it starts with simple things like this, training your mind so that it can stay in the present moment. You tell it to stay and it’ll stay. If your mind is not obedient, it’s worse than having a disobedient dog in the house. A dog can ruin your furniture, scratch up the walls. But a disobedient mind can ruin your life.

So learn how to train it so it serves the purposes that you really hold to as having genuine value, genuine worth. That’s how happiness is found.