Self Reliance and Purpose.

These past few months, I've been needing some inspiration and advice myself.

I don't know if I'm making the right decisions, I don't know where I want to be, where I'm going. I am not sure of anything right now. When everyone is writing essays, finding themselves, I am running outside to the woods to think.

To clear my head maybe, to reflect, to find something that can simply deconstruct every part of my persona and detail it in 500 words. But it doesn't work.

Am I simple enough to sum up in 500 words?

Are any of us?

I'm a complicated polynomial, a scientific question waiting to be solved, a controversial supreme court case, a column in the paper evoking debate. I'm no where near easy to define. I just don't know what's true and untrue. I do not know how to define my theoretical thinking. Am I forever searching for a purpose? Is this search expediting madness? What is realistically me? Do I have to have all of the answers? I've lived maybe a fourth of my life; there is so much left to experience. Who I am now is not who I'll be in 3 - 4 years. Hopefully, I'll have cultivated a better person in me. Hopefully, I'll have grown with age and time. Hopefully, I'll have wisened over the years.

It's okay though, I'm writing obviously because I've found cause to.

And cause in this case is Emerson's Self Reliance.

"With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you say t-day. - 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' - Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

If I remain true to myself day-to-day, the rest will work itself out on its own.

So that essay I have to write? No problem, a quick DL of factual truths about myself, and I'll be done.

In truth, we envision some grand purpose our life has, and go mad trying to realize it. But if we live life honest to ourselves, then only we can say our life has a purpose.