How to Live a Life with Purpose – Part 3
One of the biggest demonstrations of purpose in recent history started with a one-sentence statement in 1961.
The Soviet Union had already won the first round of the space race when they put Sputnik I into orbit around the earth. It was a huge win for Soviet pride and propaganda and a major setback for the fledgling American space effort. The Soviets pulled further ahead in the race early in 1961 when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space.
Six weeks later, against the backdrop of a Cold War the United States seemed to be losing, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress. He shocked the country and the world when he declared: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
This was a bold direction of purpose that came with huge challenges. Many things would be working against NASA as they sought to guide the path of a small space craft toward the moon. Including the laws of Physics.
To ascend from its starting point at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the Saturn V rocket propelling the Apollo 11 space craft was designed to overcome the massive pull of the earth’s gravity. Most of the six million pounds of fuel were just to escape the atmosphere.
But that was just the beginning of the challenges they would face.
- NASA scientists had to plot changes in direction toward the moving target of the moon while taking into account new data along the way. If their calculations were off by only one degree, they could miss the moon by over 4000 miles.
- Everyone on the team had a role to play, and NASA Mission Control would help guide Apollo 11 from the Houston Space Center. But radio transmissions were not ideal, and the astronauts would lose all contact with Houston every time the craft passed behind the moon.
- The mission team had to adjust the path of the craft along the way, and the on-board IBM guidance computer had less than one millionth the memory of today’s cell phones.
- The astronauts had to keep their eyes open to make in-flight adjustments to their path to overcome physics hurdles including friction, momentum, and centrifugal force.
- They had responsibility to operate the space module across almost 239,000 miles of space, and the success of the mission and their very lives depended on the choices they made.
In spite of the obstacles, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing module Eagle onto the surface of the moon and made history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” (Les Brown)
How to Find Purpose in the Path
In college, my focus was on partying, not purpose. Which made my 8:00 AM Freshman Physics class a challenge.
Despite frequent hangovers and missed classes, I got through the quarter, and some of those Physics lessons actually stayed with me. For example, how the trajectory of an object traveling through space is composed of its starting point, direction, and path.
It was only later that I noticed how much we can learn about life from Physics.
Our purpose is the trajectory we travel during life. From our starting point with the talents we have been given, we plot a direction and navigate our path, which is how we live with purpose each day. But things change as we get older and—hopefully—wiser.
Like the Apollo 11 team, we face many challenges along the way. But if we follow the right path and make adjustments along the way, we can not only find purpose, we can live it out in our lives. But how do we do that?
- We create a plan for where we want to go that includes the values we choose to follow. But since values may change as we mature, this “map” must be one we can adjust along the way.
- We can get direction from people who have traveled the path before, and we find purpose as we go by serving each of the roles we are given along our journey.
- We each have a guidance system to help us make adjustments when we’re going in the wrong direction, so we focus on using it each day. Some call it their “conscience” and others know it as God.
- We keep our eyes open along the way. This enables us to discover insights and purpose that make life more exciting and which may provide a faster way to get where we are going.
- We gratefully choose to accept our responsibility for following the right path. In so doing, we live a life with purpose.
I wish I had realized all this in college. Perhaps I would have directed my path more wisely along the way.
But I didn’t have a plan for my life, and I wasn’t thinking about big ideas such as purpose. Which means my values were being shaped as a random by-product of my impulsive lifestyle choices such as:
- Life is about having fun right now, so there’s no need to think much about the future.
- I care mostly about myself, but I’m not hurting anybody, and I don’t need any advice.
- I’m smart enough to control my own life and don’t feel like thinking about God stuff.
- Alcohol makes me feel the way I want to feel, so the more I drink, the better I’ll feel.
- Pretty good grades are good enough, and studying is a buzz kill, so why work hard?
I didn’t think about my role in life or how my actions affected others. I made choices that hurt a few people (which I only regretfully recognized decades later through the self-learning of recovery.) And I certainly wasn’t wasting time talking to older students or mentors to learn from their experiences.
I wasn’t thinking about God, and I certainly didn’t want him telling me what to do. And if my conscience spoke up too harshly, I would silence that unwelcome input with another drink.
I was going with the flow, trying to fit in, and having as good a time as possible. My eyes were on the next beer and finding a good party. I didn’t need inspiration—I knew where I wanted to go.
I was making choices—mostly bad ones—everyday. But I wasn’t facing up to the responsibility or possible consequences of what I was doing. Looking back, I firmly believe that it is only through God’s grace that I didn’t screw up while driving drunk or do something else stupid to mess up my life.
I wasn’t on the right path, and it would take me a couple of decades to figure that out.
“It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something.” (Winston Churchill)
Question: What path in life are you on right now, and is it leading you to purpose?
Action: Read the next article in this series which is titled “Living with Purpose Today.”
