It’s a simple question-why are you here? What is your primary function? Why are you alive? This is something so simple we should all know the answer. And on some level we all do.
I walked into the emergency room at the hospital and asked what room he was in. The attendant was very polite and told us where we needed to go and where the elevators were and more importantly, where the rest rooms were located. We forgot everything she told us except where the rest rooms were and after we went to the rest room we could better understand everything she said.
That could be life in its most basic modern form. Let me go to the bathroom and then I can listen. When someone walks into an emergency room at 11PM after driving two hours in the dark and not drinking their champagne in the hot tub as planned, but getting in their car after hastily packing a suitcase to drive to some godforsaken hospital, life gets pretty basic.
When you strip away all the social myth and bullshit we’ve wrapped ourselves in, we get down to some very basic truths. They are elegant and simple and profound. They provide all the sustenance we’ve ever needed although, God forbid, we should ever wake up from our self-induced daydream about who we really are long enough to revisit our whole reason for being. After all this is the new millennium and all that stuff we learnt when we was children don’t work no more.
When we walked in the room I was reminded of about a million other scenes in my life when I walked in the room in the hospital. You walk in and there they are, your blood relative, laying there in their sterilized hospital gown, existing on the most advanced medical terms possible and you just want to cry because it’s not natural. Aunt Betty or uncle Bob or mom or dad or little sister shouldn’t be lying there now. They shouldn’t be in this place at all and I always feel like some kind of intruder in a foreign environment sent there by secret forces to rescue them and take them home where they belong.
Emergency room memories are a stark reminder of our mortality and just how fragile life is. It’s mostly in these strained moments out of time that we can understand our birth certificate didn’t come with a warranty. Despite all the social reminders we are constantly bombarded with, life itself is precarious, and there are no guarantees of a next breath for anyone. We’re mostly unconscious to that last part. It’s somehow irrelevant to whatever scheme we’re working on right now.
At the beginning of each day we need to review the little note we posted on the mirror in our bathroom to remind us for our reason to be. Oh! I don’t have one. Neither do I, but I’m going to get one when I finish typing. I never realized how important it was for me to have a reason to be and was a little stunned when I thought I did, but couldn’t quite formulate it into actual words. Well now I can. And here’s the cool part…I think this might be a reason to be for everyone on some level. I mean, there will be at least seven billion different variations and expressions of this truth, but they can all boil down to this….
“My role in life is to bring light into the darkness, to bring joy to a sorrowful heart, and comfort to anyone who needs comforting. My job is to mirror back to everyone I meet just how beautiful and perfect they really are.”
What I realized of course is I can never do that until I completely forgive myself for screwing up absolutely everything I’ve ever touched. And I can do that by grace and gratitude and by accepting the loving kindness all around me. I release my own sins and craziness to a universe that only wants to help me bring light and love to others. We each must do the work necessary to discover our own reason for being, but in the end, it will be pretty much the same for all of us. We are after all only people trying to live the best lives we can without hurting those around us.
