This is the average time around which people start questioning life. This little bridge between shedding our childish ways and adapting a mindset better fit to understand the world around. Couldn’t guess it yet? I’ll make it a bit easier for you-the end of teenage (as if the title didn’t give it away already!).

A sudden urge arises to make meaningful use of the time given to us. But oftentimes, the path is unclear, and the words meaning and passion and purpose starts to haunt us. For people who have been nudged onto a path by their environment at a young age, this is not a difficult question to answer, as they’re already good at something and they are already pre-occupied with that activity, getting better and better. Their purpose is very well defined-continue on the path that life has put them into (this is not to mean anything less about their way of life.) But what about the other strata, the ones who’ve never been forced out of their own ways for following something? Don’t they have any reason for being?

This is where things get interesting, and this very thing which makes it interesting is what makes people quit.

They are entitled to choose anything as their purpose. For them, their purpose is what they make it to be. Having no other thing tying themselves down, they are free to imagine the wildest of lives. This oftentimes causes a lot of overwhelm, and leads to them leading mediocre lives. Having buried their quest for purpose under the surrender to overwhelm and familiarity, they often lead unsatisfactory lives well into their retirement, unless, of course, something nudges them off course.

Figuring out one’s life purpose is not an easy job, and harder is the path to owning it. All that one has to do is decide on something, stick to it, and make it happen. For me, personally, your life’s purpose, your destiny is a complex interpolation of the things that happen to you and the things that you choose when these things happen to you. It is in no way fixed, as, along the path, on every step you have the choice, the power to turn it all around.

That is the forming of purpose. Once a person has that figured out, the next thing becomes living it. This is where false expectations and unproductive mindset destroy people’s lives, and to top it all off, this is a topic about which the majority of false advice exists. I am in no way suggesting myself to be an authority on people’s opinions. All that I’m trying to do, like everyone else, is share my opinion.

We all are happiness and comfort loving creatures, so much so that we often tend to avoid struggle altogether, and get caught up in the ‘life-is-always-a-wonderland’ train. Life is a beautiful wonderland, but as Carl Jung rightfully remarked,”No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” We tend to forget that en route to a happy and meaningful life on the vehicle of our purpose, the road becomes treacherous, testing our strength and grit and our faith in ourselves. We give up at this point, having believed life’s lies confirming our doubts, and having succumbed to the very thing that was made to test our mettle.

Everyone is free to choose their meaning of life, to define their purpose, and follow it with all that they have, as long as they don’t give up.