Purpose is achieved by striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work and by cultivating your connection to something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.
Think of purpose as mined and made (not found). Typical metal mining is an arduous, risky, and time-consuming affair. Copper, gold, and silver are often buried deep underground. These precious metals aren’t pure and refined in their natural state but are diffuse - scattered in trace amounts through tons of waste rock and dirt. They are there, but they’re hard to find. Good mining operations have to identify concentrations of the metals, they must laboriously chisel and dig for them, and then they must painstakingly refine the materials until they have a purer version of the valuable substance they seek.
Learning to search consciously for purpose in our work, to refresh our sources of meaning, and to witness the values of our efforts with new eyes is a constant but worthwhile struggle and learning to employ the same technique away from our jobs can open us to the meaning embedded in every part of our lives.
The Shushwap region was and is considered by the Indian people to be a rich place: rich in salmon and game, rich in below-ground food resources such as tubers and roots - a plentiful land. In this region, the people would live in permanent village sites and exploit the environs for needed resources. They had elaborate technologies for very effectively using the resources of the environment, and perceived their lives as being good and rich. Yet, the elders said, at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning. So the elders, in their wisdom, would decide that the entire village should move, those moves occurring every 25 to 30 years. The entire population would move to a different part of the Shushwap land and there, they found challenge. There were new streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where the balsamroot would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and healthy. Incidentally, it also allowed exploited resources in one area to recover after years of harvesting.
The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during her most memorable race, her lungs might have felt like exploding, and she might have been dizzy with fatigue - yet these could have been the best moments of her life. Getting control of life is never easy. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery - or perhaps, a sense of participation in determining the content of life - that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.