Self-Reflection

"Your job then is not to directly pursue the purpose right away. It's to ask yourself, what conditions do I need to cultivate in my life to make that purpose really blossom, really flourish. We can get kind of mad at ourselves because we're not doing our purpose when we didn't take the time to set the conditions, and it can take a few years to set up. It's sort of like a garden. You get a seed planted either by yourself, by your family, by the universe, and then your job is to provide the soil and the nutrients and the sunshine and water and stakes in the ground to allow this seed to grow. Same thing in your own life. What they need is a supportive community of like-minded folks, time in nature, spiritual connection, and often a daily mind-body practice that helps them stay at a certain level of spiritual fitness and resilience. If your purpose is big enough, it's going to be scary, and it's going to cause trouble, so you've got to have a certain level of agility, flexibility, and nimbleness to get through all of the obstacles that might be put in your path."