"I think the purpose of life is to be useful, responsible, honorable, compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”
Leo Rosten
So this is Mr. Rosten's answer to the question posed to life a few days ago on this blog: what is your purpose? I like his ideas but I need to add more. For one thing, Mr. Rosten's purpose is oh so serious. I will add to his very important pieces that the purpose of life is to love and to learn. I will also add laughter to the list. Being useful, honorable, compassionate and responsible is all good but , for me, there must be an infusion of warmth, affection, playfulness, and passion. Really, life is short and to have loved and to have laughed is what I want to remember. I am painfully responsible and useful and that's all good. But my life is really fed by laugher, affection, warmth - in a word, love. Without those things, I can feel very empty. In fact, I can feel dead. I know my life must be rich in those experiences. Sometimes I have to actually work hard to build in the lightness and playfulness and , frankly, that's not what I want. But, here's something else I know: it is hard to break patterns.
Mr. Rosten and I would have been oatmeal cookie buddies, as I too find honor, compassion, helpfulness, and responsibility to be admirable characteristics. Does that mean that there is no laughter, affection, love or warmth associated with me? The two arenas are not mutually exclusive. And yes, patterns, or paradigms, are hard to shift. That's why you can't do it in a day. That's why thinking comes in handy, even if it's hard.
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