The purpose in life is not to find yourself.

This New York Times op-ed, "It's Not About You," was really wonderful and illuminating. My favorites:

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

and

Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

As a whole, our culture likes to preach about "self" -- and it celebrates finding your own path and passions and charting your own territory and being, it must be said, like a Maverick. I certainly indulge in it all the time (see: this entire blog), but I like to think the truth I am leaning into is not so much about me, but about my place in the "we," the great big universe around us. What if we changed our discourse from "you" to "we"? What if we asked ourselves, "How can I best benefit the whole?"

I just finished the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, and I truly thought it was brilliant. It's a dystopian young adult sci-fi thing, where settlers have inhabited a distant planet, only to be "infected" with what they call a germ -- the thoughts of men are suddenly audible/visible. It drives many of them completely nuts and is quite tormenting. By the end of the third book you see what is actually happening is that these settlers have become, in a much more tangible way, connected to the greater "we," and they struggle with their own voices and how they fit into that "we." How the many voices can coexist peacefully. That struggle leads to all kinds of terrible things -- genocide and war among them.

In the third book, we get insight into the alien race on the planet. The settlers call the aliens the Spackle; the aliens call themselves The Land. They exist within a collective identity. They are not their own "people," but part of The Land. They are at peace with, and find comfort in, being part of the "we" on the planet.

There is so much more to the book than this, but I think it's that wonderful metaphor that strikes me so much, just as the author's message does in his "It's Not About You" article -- maybe one of the greatest lessons I can teach my children is that yes, they are very special, not so much because they are their own amazing individuals, but because they are part of the "we," and they can do amazing things within it.