"So Winona, what keeps you going?"
I was asked this question on the first day of my internship, and it caught me by surprise. It was a big question, a question laced with too much complexity that couldn't be put into words. I paused for a few seconds before letting the words "What exactly do you mean by that?" slowly roll off the tip of my tongue.
"What pushes you forward? Why do you the things you want to do?"
Having a chat session with a senior person in the company that you're interning at does not entitle you with time to think of a perfectly planned out answer. Face to face, followed by a pause in conversation only up to a point where it is deemed socially acceptable, I spurred out an answer. It came off the top of my head but it was not nonsense - in fact, it was probably the purest form of truth, jumbled up into a cobweb of many long sentences trying to justify what I was saying.
He was satisfied with my answer, and surprisingly so was I.
What keeps you going? It seemed like a question that I felt I would never be able to answer. What drives me to live my life day to day feeling hopeful? To know what keeps me going would mean to know what my purpose in life is. Purpose. Now that's a big word. Purpose, the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. Maybe there are 19-year-olds out there who are certain of their motivation, but it seemed like such a longshot for someone like me to reach that level of certainty. It seemed like it would take forever for me to figure out the purpose for which I exist as a person. A purpose has to be independent of people. It has to come with a sense of stability and comfort that is not fed off the approval of others but instead rewarded to you by yourself.
After thinking about this for quite a while, I've realized that a complex question probably requires a complex solution. Maybe, it needs to be answered in a few steps.
Step 1: What do I want in my life?
A vague question that is open to interpretation. Before finding a purpose, I feel that it is important to know what you want the foundation of your life to be. A frame that you want to keep for the rest of your days, something that keeps the building blocks grounded as you stack them up along the way. Your foundation could be anything. It could be your values or the things that you strongly believe in. It could be a view that you want to see every morning when you wake up or it could be the way you want your workspace to look like in your future home. It could be something visible to the eye or something only visible to the heart.
As for me, I want a life where that motivates me to always keep inspired. I want a life that revolves around the chance to express myself, to share opinions and to take action. I don't want to live aiming for a sense of accomplishment that stems from personal achievements that benefit me. The satisfaction that I want to feel needs to be one that comes from doing good for people out there. I want to make an impact on someone's life. You could say that it's a common dream - the dream to make a difference and change the world. But each person has their own idea of how to do it, each person has their own aspect of our world that they want to try fixing. In all honesty, I'm not sure how I'm planning to approach this dream, neither am I sure on where to start. But then again, you can't plan your future by the book - things just happen and you learn to make the most of it opportunity window you get. What I know for sure is that the foundation of my life would be one that focuses on not living selfishly for my own personal gain, which is something that's easy to give in to.
Step 2: What do I want to feel?
This refers to what I personally want for myself in terms of being emotionally content with the way things are. At this point of time in our lives, it's easy to get swept up by the currents. Every little shift in our day seems to throw us off balance, and we find ourselves being extremely happy one second and unknowingly sad in the next. Some days I feel tired just thinking about how little I know and how little I've seen, and on other days I feel tired thinking about how I've seen too much now. The way you feel on a day to day basis, the way you look at the little things in your life, the mindset that you approach things with - these shape how your day is going to be, and collectively how your life is going to be as well.
I'm a person that's very emotionally driven. I like to internalize the things that I see or experience and reflect them in solitude, and by solitude I mean a mental solitude and not a physical one. I want to search for things that overwhelm me with a rush of different emotions, things that make me feel alive more than anything else. I want to live for moments that are raw and honest. I want to be completely passionate and over the moon about the things that I involve myself with and the people that I surround myself with. More importantly, I want to go through every single day feeling at peace with the way I am. I don't want my life to be a series of looking forward to a fresh start and hoping that I have another shot to change the way things are now.
Step 3: What makes me happy?
Knowing what makes you happy is such an important thing. In fact, to me, it could be considered the most important thing. If you have the chance to put yourself out there and do something, it needs to be something that makes waking up every morning worth it. It needs to be something that makes you look at yourself in the mirror feeling satisfied at the reflection you see.
What makes me happy? Showing appreciation and being shown appreciation. No matter how much you love space or love your alone time, as important as self-love and self-confidence is, you will always need people. You can't grow and learn on your own. Here's one of my favorite quotes regarding that -
I will only be happy doing something that I believe in, so pursuing my passions is something that I need my life to be about. And I suppose I'm especially happy knowing that there is so much out there for me to conquer, and knowing that I have so much more space to grow. I also find a great amount of joy laced in the smallest of moments - like watching the way sunsets poke through the windows on the train on my way back from work or impromptu tea time shenanigans with my family on the weekends. I think everybody has their own 'little moment' that makes them feel a certain warmth that you can't forge, and I think it's important to always hold on to them.
Step 4: Tying it all together.
A purpose. A reason. It has to be something that you believe is the ground that you build your life upon. It has to allow you to experience the emotions that make you feel most alive. It has to make you happy at the end of the day. If at the end of this you still remember how my boss asked me this question and how I gave him a top off my head answer, here's what I told him:
"I guess knowing that there's so much out there that I haven't experience. Knowing that there's so much that I want to change and so much I want to say, yet there's so much that I don't know - I think at this point, that keeps me going."
I'm 19. I can't tell you how my future is going to turn out, heck I can't even tell you how tomorrow is going to turn out. So I suppose I can't tell you what my purpose for existing is just yet. I suppose I'm very far away from finding that answer.
But I know what I want, and that keeps me going. So I guess that for now, that's more than enough.
"What pushes you forward? Why do you the things you want to do?"
Having a chat session with a senior person in the company that you're interning at does not entitle you with time to think of a perfectly planned out answer. Face to face, followed by a pause in conversation only up to a point where it is deemed socially acceptable, I spurred out an answer. It came off the top of my head but it was not nonsense - in fact, it was probably the purest form of truth, jumbled up into a cobweb of many long sentences trying to justify what I was saying.
He was satisfied with my answer, and surprisingly so was I.
What keeps you going? It seemed like a question that I felt I would never be able to answer. What drives me to live my life day to day feeling hopeful? To know what keeps me going would mean to know what my purpose in life is. Purpose. Now that's a big word. Purpose, the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. Maybe there are 19-year-olds out there who are certain of their motivation, but it seemed like such a longshot for someone like me to reach that level of certainty. It seemed like it would take forever for me to figure out the purpose for which I exist as a person. A purpose has to be independent of people. It has to come with a sense of stability and comfort that is not fed off the approval of others but instead rewarded to you by yourself.
After thinking about this for quite a while, I've realized that a complex question probably requires a complex solution. Maybe, it needs to be answered in a few steps.
Step 1: What do I want in my life?
A vague question that is open to interpretation. Before finding a purpose, I feel that it is important to know what you want the foundation of your life to be. A frame that you want to keep for the rest of your days, something that keeps the building blocks grounded as you stack them up along the way. Your foundation could be anything. It could be your values or the things that you strongly believe in. It could be a view that you want to see every morning when you wake up or it could be the way you want your workspace to look like in your future home. It could be something visible to the eye or something only visible to the heart.
As for me, I want a life where that motivates me to always keep inspired. I want a life that revolves around the chance to express myself, to share opinions and to take action. I don't want to live aiming for a sense of accomplishment that stems from personal achievements that benefit me. The satisfaction that I want to feel needs to be one that comes from doing good for people out there. I want to make an impact on someone's life. You could say that it's a common dream - the dream to make a difference and change the world. But each person has their own idea of how to do it, each person has their own aspect of our world that they want to try fixing. In all honesty, I'm not sure how I'm planning to approach this dream, neither am I sure on where to start. But then again, you can't plan your future by the book - things just happen and you learn to make the most of it opportunity window you get. What I know for sure is that the foundation of my life would be one that focuses on not living selfishly for my own personal gain, which is something that's easy to give in to.
Step 2: What do I want to feel?
This refers to what I personally want for myself in terms of being emotionally content with the way things are. At this point of time in our lives, it's easy to get swept up by the currents. Every little shift in our day seems to throw us off balance, and we find ourselves being extremely happy one second and unknowingly sad in the next. Some days I feel tired just thinking about how little I know and how little I've seen, and on other days I feel tired thinking about how I've seen too much now. The way you feel on a day to day basis, the way you look at the little things in your life, the mindset that you approach things with - these shape how your day is going to be, and collectively how your life is going to be as well.
I'm a person that's very emotionally driven. I like to internalize the things that I see or experience and reflect them in solitude, and by solitude I mean a mental solitude and not a physical one. I want to search for things that overwhelm me with a rush of different emotions, things that make me feel alive more than anything else. I want to live for moments that are raw and honest. I want to be completely passionate and over the moon about the things that I involve myself with and the people that I surround myself with. More importantly, I want to go through every single day feeling at peace with the way I am. I don't want my life to be a series of looking forward to a fresh start and hoping that I have another shot to change the way things are now.
Step 3: What makes me happy?
Knowing what makes you happy is such an important thing. In fact, to me, it could be considered the most important thing. If you have the chance to put yourself out there and do something, it needs to be something that makes waking up every morning worth it. It needs to be something that makes you look at yourself in the mirror feeling satisfied at the reflection you see.
What makes me happy? Showing appreciation and being shown appreciation. No matter how much you love space or love your alone time, as important as self-love and self-confidence is, you will always need people. You can't grow and learn on your own. Here's one of my favorite quotes regarding that -
"You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things."
- Jamie Tworkowski, founder of To Write Love on Her Arms (An NGO that's worth reading up on, link is to their website)
I will only be happy doing something that I believe in, so pursuing my passions is something that I need my life to be about. And I suppose I'm especially happy knowing that there is so much out there for me to conquer, and knowing that I have so much more space to grow. I also find a great amount of joy laced in the smallest of moments - like watching the way sunsets poke through the windows on the train on my way back from work or impromptu tea time shenanigans with my family on the weekends. I think everybody has their own 'little moment' that makes them feel a certain warmth that you can't forge, and I think it's important to always hold on to them.
Step 4: Tying it all together.
A purpose. A reason. It has to be something that you believe is the ground that you build your life upon. It has to allow you to experience the emotions that make you feel most alive. It has to make you happy at the end of the day. If at the end of this you still remember how my boss asked me this question and how I gave him a top off my head answer, here's what I told him:
"I guess knowing that there's so much out there that I haven't experience. Knowing that there's so much that I want to change and so much I want to say, yet there's so much that I don't know - I think at this point, that keeps me going."
I'm 19. I can't tell you how my future is going to turn out, heck I can't even tell you how tomorrow is going to turn out. So I suppose I can't tell you what my purpose for existing is just yet. I suppose I'm very far away from finding that answer.
But I know what I want, and that keeps me going. So I guess that for now, that's more than enough.
