Purpose

There are two days that are the most significant days in life, the day you are born and the day you find out why. It is a confusing time in the middle of the two when certain occurrences will happen and you will not understand why. Mauricio Garcia raised a fantastic question in my mind when he spoke in front of our class. He made an example by talking about his experience coming to America from El- Salvador. He said that he resisted the entire time and wanted more than anything to be able to go back to his home country. The speaker didn’t understand what was happening to him until he had a glance of his purpose at a vending machine one day. Mr. Garcia had been in America for 5 years and still didn’t speak a bit of English. One day at a rest stop he was trying to get a Milky Way candy bar out of a vending machine, but the machine needed more money and was asking for more coins; because Mr. Garcia could not speak English he misunderstood and started SPEAKING, asking out loud for his chocolate. His hilarious accident raised a question in his mind about his purpose. Mr. Garcia then said to the audience, “If you want to understand your purpose, start looking at the circumstances happening all around you”. After he said that something in my mind clicked.

When I was little I was a very outgoing child. I never sat still and I would always love to be the center of attention. My parents said I would always have people coming up to them telling them that they would be watching out for me one day. When I was in high school I started to act, as I began my acting career I realized that this was something absolutely special to me. I wanted to do it all the time! As my skills became sharper and I began to do it on a regular basis I figured out that I might possibly want to do this for the rest of my life. Being able to cover up who I was, and able to express myself through another person’s character is absolutely phenomenal.  I have been too many competitions and scored magnificently in many stage shows, I even was awarded a talent grant to FSCJ. Looking back at my life a year and some change later I want to kick myself. I let all those opportunities go to be a rebel child. As Mr. Garcia phrased it, I should have taken my surroundings into account as I was washing a big part of what could have been my future down the drain. I see it now through a different lens, but I wish I had taken it into account.

            Mothers always have stories for everything, when I asked her about how she knew what her purpose in life was she told me an interesting story about how she knew she wanted to go into therapy. She brought me back to a time when she was younger (although she didn’t reveal how long ago) and in college.  She said she was in a convenient store buying groceries for the following week; she spoke of it to be a normal day where she was just going about her every day business. “I have always had a way about reading people’s emotions; I can always tell when someone is troubled”. There was a woman next to her in the aisle that looked very worried, my mom struck up a casual conversation and the woman seemed to lay on her life story to my mother in the middle of Wal-mart. She spoke about the children she was losing; the divorce she was going through with, the life she knew and loved was basically disintegrating in front of her eyes. After their three hour long conversation, my mother left the store and switched her major in college the next day to Psychology, my mother said that after she examined the situation she realized that her perspective of people changed and she wanted to help as many as she could. The circumstances that began to happen around her helped her realize that she was put on the earth to help people through their problems.

            In the Great Gatsby, the main character Nick goes through a very confusing part of his life where he decides to move east after coming back from WW1. Nick tells a tragic story about the everyday rich. Nick is a very honest guy, he is a caring man that lent out a hand to everyone and was a characters rock when he needed to be.  Throughout the whole story Nick was thrown around by different character’s and taken for granted multiple times, as the book comes to an end Nick realized due to everything happening all around him that it was time for him to go back to his old life and settle down, due to his circumstances that where occurring to others he knew he needed to get out of that life.  Another book that speaks about purpose is The Crucible. In the Crucible, John Proctor is an adulterous man ultimately put to death in a puritan society. John Proctor understood his surroundings as well when he realized that he didn’t want his word defaced, so he died for his cause. That was his purpose.

            After the purpose is revealed to someone, they start to realize that everything starts to fall into place suddenly. Things start making sense that didn’t before and there is more of an understanding about why certain things happened in their life that they didn’t understand before. People have a hard time accepting things that make them uncomfortable, they are very keen to being creatures of habit. When circumstances keep happening over and over again to someone they might just accuse it as bad luck, however luck may have nothing to do with it. It may be something to do with fate, as some like to believe and some do not. It is not for one to throw a pity party about, some are meant to be lessons and some are meant to show what their purpose is. It is all a matter of perspective, accepting that isn’t easy sometimes but it does have to happen. The way that everything plays out is up the “victim of the circumstance”. They can choose to deny what they think is certain, or they can chose to accept it and embrace all of endless possibility.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citied Works:

1.      Fitzgerald, F S. The Great Gatsby. Vol. 1. New York City: Charles Scribners Son, 1925. 1-180. 1 vols. Print.

2.      Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Vol. 1. New York: The Penguins Play, 1967. 4 vols. Print.