On Purpose

Monday August 24th, a perfect day.

A friend was lamenting yesterday that he felt he had no purpose in life and I was thinking, maybe we don't need a purpose to just be or do.

I was thinking how i enjoy writing this blog just for the fun of doing it. I don't need 'likes' or 'followers' and i don't even expect readers, though they do turn up.

Two hundred years ago a midwife kept a little journal of her experiences helping women in that most dangerous and painful experience of giving birth. I speak from experience. It is almost impossible to describe the anguish and terror of a baby growing inside your body, that big living lump of humanity that then has to squeeze out through that far too small an opening. The pain has been known to send women mad. This heroic and merciful figure wrode a horse in snow in the New York frontier of the 1700's and a canoe in freezing river waters to come to the rescue of women in the most dire circumstance of their lives. She saved them and kept the little hournal, for no more purpose than her own record.

Her female ancestors saved her hournal and passed it down generation after generation until in one generation it ended up in the hands of her distant descendant, Clara Barton. A hundred years later a historian had it published and it became a film.

Similarly a young dumpster diver found a little red notebook kept by a young woman who moved to New York City in the 1920s. The young woman saved the little red book and she and her boyfriend, a librarian searched out the author, an elderly woman in her late 80's living in Florida and gave her the book. They wrote a book about the adventure.

The point is that something you do may turn out to have had a purpose you never imagined, and it might just as well disappear in to the ash heap of material culture. I just don't thibk you need to have a purpose to be and to do. Existance is its own purpose.

Just a thought - Happy trails wherever they may lead

wrightj45@yahoo.com