Spooky - purpose connects events over time

How do we find our purpose? Or does it find us? Or do we find each other? I find it amazing how life either seems to conspire to articulate a purpose for us, or we read purpose into life, or a bit of both happens over and over. Adaptation seems to play a hand.

I admit to feeling a "spooky action at a distance" across time every now and then - there are times when I know the rough shape of what's going to happen. It's as if a purpose, or strong intent, draws me through time. For instance, I knew what highschool and university I'd study at - even though it wasn't in any way a given that it'd be easy to achieve, not by a long shot. Very hard exams were studied for and passed with flying colours. A couple of decades ago, I knew that I'd travel to New Zealand, even if only for a skiing holiday. At the time, I didn't have any idea how I'd ever travel anywhere beyond Romania - didn't have any resources apart from this bundle of awareness condensed into a body. It turns out that life happened such that I've been living in Aotearoa since 1997, and loving it.

Now I feel intensely drawn to help lots of people to think, work and live better in tight-knit communities. I wonder what life will make of this...

Imagination - the engine of life

Imagination seems to have a most powerful impact on our lives, although we seldom stop to consider it.

Every once in a while, random changes may turn out to work out as improvements. Random improvements work well as an evolutionary mechanism on a geologic time scale. For humans, our brief span of life precludes us from using a similar strategy for improving our lives. In order to establish a habit of continuous improvement, we must practice imagining better ways of thinking, organizing or doing.

The better we become at using our imagination, the more we can create a fresh world. When we respond in an unusual way to a stimulus, we typically do so by engaging our imagination.

Forgiveness also requires imagination and courage. Retaliation is easy - folks choose it because they can't imagine a better way of resolving their grievance, and it may be perceived to satisfy a sense of fairness or justice. Forgiveness is hard - it requires imagining a world in which an agressor may go unpunished. Yet, the forgiver may imagine ways of influencing the forgiven such that the aggression ceases, amends are made, and harmony is achieved. That is very hard. Many despair of it being achievable, and can't imagine it possible.

Imagine more of us would make a habit of saying "I have a dream" more often...