Alive - by Dave Smith

I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer. As a child I spent hours playing
football on my own, dreaming of playing for my favourite team – who
always won! Into my teens, I would occasionally dream of entering
politics and one day becoming prime minister. Thankfully, for
everyone’s sake (my own included), such dreams never came to
pass! With hindsight, though, I can see that underneath those youthful
dreams was a deeper longing for a true sense of purpose and
meaning, which for many years went unfulfilled.
What about you? Maybe your childhood dreams have come true or,
perhaps like me, you can reflect with thankfulness that they didn’t!
Maybe you have dreams in your heart right now that you’ve been
holding on to for a long time, but you’re unsure whether they are the
right ones or whether they will come to pass.
The Japanese have a word for this sense of purpose, this
‘something’ that gets us up in the morning – ikagai, which translates
literally as ‘a reason for being’. Knowing or becoming clear about our
life purpose is a critical part of what it means for us to be and feel
fully alive. As a few famous people have pointed out:
Winston Churchill: ‘It’s not enough to have lived. We should be
determined to live for something.’
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: ‘The mystery of human existence lies not in
just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.’
Mark Twain: ‘The two most important days in life are the day you
are born and the day you discover the reason why.’ 1
The reality is that to find and fulfil our life purpose is a life-long
journey.