I should have done certain things and gone to certain places before I die.
Now, imagine that a friend you haven’t spoken to for a while calls you up one day and asks, “How have you been doing?” What determines your answer? How do you decide how you have been doing? You probably do the same thing that I and everyone else does—you unconsciously check your list of “shoulds” and see how many of them you are able to check off as “done,” and how many are still incomplete. Or to use the analogy from my introduction, you check your plates to see which ones are spinning and which have fallen. Your “shoulds” become the basis upon which you evaluate how successfully you have been living.
Let’s say that in the past month, you went through a painful breakup with a man you’d been in love with, your company downsized and informed you that you should start looking for a new job, you were overdrawn on two credit cards, and you gained five pounds. How would you most likely respond when your friend asks, “How are you doing?” You know the answer: “I’m not doing well at all. In fact, I’m having a terrible month!” Perhaps you’re feeling like a failure; perhaps your self-esteem has plummeted. Perhaps your faith in life itself has been shaken, because nothing is turning out the way you think it should.
If you believe that the purpose of your life that month is to be in a great relationship, or have a stable job, or pay off your credit cards, or maintain the perfect weight, you will, indeed, feel like a failure. You will berate yourself and conclude that you are having a “bad” month, that somehow, you are blowing it. You will make yourself suffer.
This is how you sabotage your sense of self-esteem. You evaluate yourself based on a set of misunderstandings about what the purpose of your life really is. But the truth is, nothing that most of us have on our “should” list is the purpose of life.
Here is the second of our ten secrets:
SECRET NUMBER TWO:
THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS FOR
YOU TO GROW
INTO THE BEST HUMAN BEING
YOU CAN BE
What this secret doesn’t say is as important as what it does say. It doesn’t say that the purpose of life is to find the right partner, or become successful, or to raise a family, or to contribute something valuable to the planet, or even to feel good. It says that the purpose of your life is for you to grow.
This is one of the most basic metaphysical truths there is. This secret says, in effect, that life on earth is a classroom, and that you and I and everyone are students, here to learn certain lessons. In other words, life is not supposed to just go smoothly. Things are not supposed to be perfect. We are supposed to experience challenges. We are supposed to undergo difficulty. We are here to learn.
The problem is that we have forgotten this great truth, this purpose of our lives. It’s as if we sign up to come to earth thinking it is going to be some fabulous vacation spot. Then we are born, we arrive here, and begin to discover that things aren’t the way we thought they’d be. We encounter difficulty, we encounter pain, we encounter obstacles, and we become confused and disoriented. Surely there has been some mistake! The brochure said it was a paradise. So why are we being forced to go through all of these hardships?
Many of us never recover from the shock of discovering that life on earth is more like a classroom than Club Med. “You mean I’m supposed to work on myself, to go through a series of often painful lessons? This is NOT what I had in mind at all! I thought this was supposed to be about pleasure, about comfort, about fun. I don’t want to be in school! I am ready for recess!”
Doesn’t this sound an awful lot like the nine-year-old Barbara having a tantrum when she discovered that her magic castle didn’t come all perfectly put together, but rather, required patient and careful assembly? Now, imagine that my mother hadn’t explained to me that nothing was wrong with my castle, that it was supposed to be in pieces, that I was supposed to go through the process of putting it together. If I hadn’t known this, I might have erroneously concluded that I had somehow ruined the castle before I got it home, or that something was wrong with what I’d been given, or that the store had ripped me off.
Most people are born with an unconscious expectation that they are supposed to come into this world already put together, already very competent at living and loving. There comes a point in each of our lives when we have the unpleasant experience of realizing that we didn’t come all put together, and that, in fact, we are still in pieces. We look at our lives, and they do not resemble the pictures we have in our heads of how things should be turning out. And we conclude that something must be wrong with us, that we are failing at life. And we stop loving ourselves.
There is nothing wrong with you. You’ve simply forgotten what you signed up for when you came here. Life isn’t supposed to be easy. It isn’t supposed to be a smooth ride. It is designed to be challenging so that you will grow into a more conscious, loving human being.
If you look around you at the physical universe, you will see that its nature is growth. Everything from the cells in your body to the planets orbiting the sun are constantly growing, constantly changing, constantly evolving. Nothing stays still. Nothing remains the same. So think about it—why would your life be the exception? Why would you be the only thing that exists in all of creation whose purpose isn’t to grow?
I once heard a thought-provoking quote: A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job. Imagine this tiny piece of coal buried deep in the earth. If you had no understanding of the miraculous ways of Nature, you might examine the black rock and conclude that it was inert, and that it couldn’t possibly “grow.” But if you came back thousands of years later to unearth that same rock, you’d be astonished to discover that it had transformed itself into a magnificent and valuable diamond. It stuck to the job, to its purpose, which was to grow and become the most beautiful gem it could.
We are all pieces of rock becoming diamonds. And just as the earth which encases that piece of coal puts pressure on it, heats it, and exposes it to the necessary conditions that will enable it to turn into a sparkling diamond, so life is putting pressure on us, challenging us, exposing us to whatever it is we need to grow into the most loving and wise human beings we can be.
How to Make Every Day of Your Life
a Great Day
The powerful understanding contained in Secret Number Two can radically change your experience of life in every moment. Rather than judging yourself and your life based on how perfectly you are fitting into a picture of how you think things “should” be, you begin to evaluate yourself and your life based on how much you are growing, how much you are learning. This is the magic formula for making every day of your life a great day.
When you think the purpose of life is to do or get or accomplish, you will always feel like a failure when things don’t turn out as planned. When you understand that life is a classroom in which success means growing into the best human being possible, you begin evaluating yourself and your experiences from a totally different point of view.
Each day of your life, you consciously or unconsciously evaluate yourself—how did I do today? For instance, suppose you work in sales for a living, and you have a week where you encounter one difficult customer after another, the result being that you close no sales and make no commissions. At the end of that week you would probably think, “What a lousy week! I didn’t close one deal. I am so disappointed in myself. What is wrong with me?”
If you’re evaluating yourself based on the premise that the purpose of your life is to close deals, or to make money, or to achieve certain material goals, then yes, you had a lousy week. But what if you decided to evaluate yourself based on the premise that the purpose of your life is to grow? Maybe during that week, in spite of how obnoxious those potential customers