“There is nothing accidental or unnecessary in nature and there can be nothing; everything has a definite function; everything serves a definite purpose.”
—Peter Ouspensky, Fragments of An Unknown Teaching
I was speaking with my son, who went away to school last month. He is immersed in learning a craft that requires long hours of concentration. The work is more intense and demanding than anything he has experienced.
“How’s your stamina?” I asked. He thought for a moment and then gave a clear answer.
“Good. I’ve learned to turn it on,” he said.
With a swell of joy, I asked, “How do you do that?”
“I remember what I’m here for,” he said simply.
My son’s answer reminded me of the rare taste of caring deeply. It is not so much about what needs to be done, but why. When there is a sense of purpose the details are approachable.
But how to come to a feeling of purpose? And it is a feeling. No amount of thinking about good reasons makes me care. I have to feel the importance of something, which isn’t simply a matter of desire. It’s a sense of what’s important and has real value.
The old Latin from which the word value is derived has a connotation of courage (etymology:with heart) and strength of spirit, as in valor (etymology:a quality of mind which enables one to meet danger and trouble without fear).
In its descent into colloquial English, value is instead related to quantity, measured in abstract fungible or non-fungible currency. In any case, outside myself. Or it has to do with politics—one has liberal or conservative “values,” for instance.
Perhaps one should say, “what I really care about?” Or ask the question, “What am I here for?” Of course this can be a mind-boggling philosophical inquiry, but in a limited context the question is answerable. If I am honest, I am always where I am, doing what I am doing, because, however apparently trivial, I care about something.
According to Buddhism, desire and attachment to things is the cause of suffering and unease, and its cure is the process of letting go whilst staying engaged. Can I care without attachment? Can I be motivated without grasping for an outcome or result?
One explanation is that passing desires or cravings are placeholders for deeper impulses. I desire a fast car because I really wish to connect to the essence of speed, power, and agility. I desire a sexual encounter because I want to lose my separateness and merge into a creative flow. I desire a lot of money because I want freedom. I angle to impress another person because their admiration will prove that I exist. Beneath all the fleeting cravings lies something more fundamental—my heart’s desire.
To speak of a heart’s desire sounds childish, unbusinesslike. It is the stuff of fairy tales. And yet there is a reality in the language and syntax of fairy tales that speaks to a part of my nature that is not so caught up in the functional side of things. It is like an ephemeral vapor, a subtle scent of yearning for completion.
Easy to dismiss, but I think this power of wishing, so strong in children, is connected to the real qualities we seek. It is not so much a question of what I want, as what is this feeling of longing, however amorphous or unspecific, that is present in my being?
Can I connect with that yearning and allow it to be connected to what I do? So that the actions and deeds are not a means of burying the essential wish under superficial satisfactions but instead impel a process of seeking its source in myself, and in the process fulfilling my purpose in this life.
When the domain of the functional dominates the domain of values, what I do can only approximately fill the empty hole of yearning for what I truly love. Connecting to that wish, a wish upon a star, is a courageous act, a mission with heart. It requires setting aside the impulse to grasp after solutions and abide in the emptiness of yearning, and the genuine suffering of thirsting for something real.
But when I begin to be patient, even for a few moments, and feel the suffering of separation, I begin to see. Rather than looking for things to fill the emptiness I look around to see what is actually present. Abiding with the longing for wholeness I begin to see how I am able to strive, how to fulfill my purpose.
This article appears in October 2025.
