Purpose is the punch of life.
Purpose requires engagement, and engagement is the punch.
What is the purpose of life? To engage life!
What’s the purpose of purpose? Punching through anything that gets in our way.
Punching through life doesn’t always mean fighting. Sometimes the punch is the willingness to move, sometimes it’s the courage to stand still, and sometimes it’s knowing when to change direction.
Purpose is the reason something exists or is done. It represents an intended result, an aim, or a goal. Purpose can also mean determination or resoluteness. – dictionary.com
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This week, I found myself thinking about my purpose in life. For much of my life, my purpose has been split into two different purposes:
- Follow and complete the checklist society pushed upon me so that I can survive.
- Experience life as kindly as possible.
Casey Insight #1: Purpose has countless layers.
- You are an animal: your purpose is to survive and reproduce.
- You are human: your purpose is to embrace stories.
- You are part of a family: you have inherited a shared family direction.
- You go to school and get trained toward a purpose that supports your culture.
- You get a job, and your purpose gets oriented toward your workplace goals.
- You marry and have children, and your purpose shifts to raising and training them.
- We embrace our name, and purpose becomes living our own personal story proactively.
- And so many more layers! These layers of purpose entangle and conflict, and at some point the average person goes with the flow and loses touch with their personal purpose.
We inherit some purposes, accept others, and create still others for ourselves. Some are necessary for survival, while others help us find meaning. The challenge is learning which purposes truly belong to us and which we’re carrying simply because someone else handed them to us.
With so many purposes pushing us around, it’s easy to lose track of our thoughts and lose sight of our destinations.
“What you’re thinking is what you’re becoming.”
– Muhammad Ali
Casey Insight #2: You have many things to achieve in life, but always try to circle back to choices that reinforce who you want to be. Sometimes you have to punch back against challenges to make space for your own life.
Let’s modify Muhammad Ali’s quote to become:
What you’re engaging in is what you’re becoming.
This Month’s Newsletter Playlist
To Build a Home – Looking at the life we build.
Hard Sun – Pushing to explore life.
Better Together – Finding purpose together.
Tea for the Tillerman – Don’t forget to play as you search for purpose!
Why Purpose is Important
A little purpose goes a long way toward making life vibrant. When a person loses purpose, they lose direction, connections, and personal desire to live their life actively. One of the first signs of losing purpose is becoming listless or finding yourself unable to do things you used to enjoy.
Casey Insight #3: Without purpose, a person loses engagement with their personal life story.
The biggest problem with losing purpose is that a person can get caught in a cycle of non-engagement. As you know from my teachings, disengaging from life gets you nowhere. Being purposeless can lead to depression, addiction, or even overconsumption as an attempt to find something to push you forward again in life.
Over the last month, I have noticed I was slowing down and feeling disconnected in life. That feeling made me realize my purpose is shifting. For me, I can see how current events are affecting my purpose. Since my purpose is tied to kindness, I find it harder to live kindly when my country is tearing itself apart, and we get attacked for being kind. I know I am not alone. The answer becomes to revisit how I want to engage with life and embrace a new purpose!
Finding Purpose Today
When history behaves itself, life marches along predictable patterns. Yet we now face chaotic times.
Normally, people punch out a life path one checklist item after another. What happens when your checklist no longer works? What happens when real-time events punch back from unexpected directions?
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”
– Mike Tyson
How do we handle unexpected punches?
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see.”
– Muhammad Ali
Float like a butterfly. Move around the punches that come your way and let your motion create new options.
Sting like a bee. Punch back and knock out problems.
The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see. Real-life events can’t punch you if you move past problems or knock them out of your path.
While we can’t always prevent life’s punches, we can learn not to let every event determine our direction. The trick is knowing which response a situation calls for. Some problems need to be confronted, others need to be avoided, and some require us to change our direction.
Casey Insight #4: As world events shake you around, part of the challenge is shifting your purpose and staying engaged with life, even if everything around us is changing faster than we can react. You can use your purpose to keep yourself moving ahead, even when everything is coming apart.
Shifting your purpose helps you evolve with the times!
Losing Purpose
Casey Insight #5: Purpose isn’t always on.
Purpose shifts around more than people realize.
When we are injured, sick, or struggling with a major problem, our purpose naturally turns toward healing. Healing is about becoming whole again. Sometimes, healing is all the purpose we need during that hard moment of life. We don’t have to rush into creating another life story before we are ready. Becoming whole again is meaningful work in itself. Yet discovering our larger purpose isn’t only about becoming whole; it’s also about what comes after wholeness.
When we experience trauma, pain, or difficult life events, overcoming those challenges can become the central focus of our lives. Sometimes, however, we get so caught up in our struggles that our pain becomes our purpose. We start organizing our entire life story around what hurt us instead of who we want to become.
Casey Insight #6: Don’t let your pain become the punch you deliver to the world. When we act from unresolved pain, we risk spreading it into our relationships and others’ lives.
As you heal, remember to reevaluate your purpose. The purpose that helped you survive a difficult chapter may not help you thrive in the next. Healing creates space to ask a new question: Now that I am becoming whole again, where do I want to go?
Losing purpose can also happen when we disengage from life. Sometimes, we turn to alcohol, addiction, or other distractions to avoid facing our pain. These may offer temporary relief, but over time, they can pull us further away from our relationships, our experiences, and the life we want to live.
When purpose disappears, don’t assume you have failed. Instead, treat this moment as an opportunity to retrain yourself in the art of living. Experiment. Explore. Reconnect with people and experiences that help you feel engaged with life again.
Muhammad Ali understood that training wasn’t always enjoyable, but enduring difficult moments can train and prepare us for something greater.
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”
– Muhammad Ali
When we lose our purpose, we can feel defeated, as if we have lost the punch that carries us forward. Yet even defeat can become your training ground. It can teach us something about ourselves, reveal what no longer works, and help us discover a different way to engage with life.
As Ali also observed:
“Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.”
– Muhammad Ali
Casey Insight #7: Sometimes, losing purpose is the beginning of finding a better one.
In life’s hardest moments, return to the deeper purpose we all share: to keep living, connect with others, move forward when we can, and remain open to experiencing another day.
You don’t have to know your next destination to take your next step. Sometimes, today’s purpose is simply to heal, reconnect, and regain the strength to engage with life again.
As the traditional Japanese proverb reminds us:
Fall down seven times, stand up eight.
The goal isn’t to fight your way through every difficulty. Sometimes it’s to recover, change direction, and discover a new reason to keep moving forward.
Purpose is how you choose to grow through life, so make sure it keeps you healthy and true to yourself.
Where Are You Going?
In previous teachings, I explored how to find new destinations amid chaos. Now let’s add another piece to the puzzle: staying connected to your personal purpose as you travel toward those destinations.
Life will always throw punches at us. Some we can dodge, some we need to work through, and others will knock us off our feet. The trick is to remember that we don’t have to keep following the same path just because we started on it.
Personally, with so much changing in the world, I feel it’s time to change my purpose. I’m no longer going to follow and complete the checklist society pushed on me to survive. The American Dream checklist has become so distorted that I no longer recognize it as a path toward the life I want to live. The emphasis on achievement, acquisition, and keeping up with expectations has lost much of its meaning for me.
Casey Insight #8: It’s easy to lose purpose when we try to be someone we are not. Remember to engage with life in a manner that matches your essence. Style does matter!
My purpose has become simpler: to live a fair and balanced life, experienced and shared with those I love. I want to engage with life kindly, without losing myself in the chaos around me.
Water doesn’t need to fight its way through life. It finds its path by adapting to the landscape around it. Sometimes purpose works the same way. We don’t always need to push harder; we need to find the way that naturally fits who we are.
The highest excellence is like (that of) water. The excellence
of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying,
without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men
dislike. Hence (its way) is near to (that of) the Tao.– Tao Te Ching, Chapter 8, James Legge translation
Water supports life without demanding that everything flow its way. Perhaps purpose can work like that too: we can contribute to the world while remaining true to our own nature.
Casey Insight #9: My current purpose isn’t a high-energy purpose, so I move a bit more slowly as a result. Don’t confuse a high-energy purpose with being better than a low-energy purpose. Understand the style and nature of your purpose so you can pace yourself correctly in life.
Your purpose doesn’t have to look like someone else’s. Some people find purpose in building, creating, and constantly pushing ahead. Others find purpose in slowing down, connecting with others, and appreciating what they already have. Neither approach is inherently better. What matters is whether your purpose reflects the life you want to live.
Casey Insight #10: Your purpose should serve the life you want to live, not just the life you were taught to live.
So, where are you going?
Are you still pursuing a purpose that fits who you were years ago? Are you still stuck trying to overcome yesterday’s problems? Or are you ready to engage with life differently and explore what comes next?
You don’t need to have every answer. Start by noticing where your energy goes, what you care about, and what brings you back to yourself. Sometimes, finding purpose means pushing forward. Sometimes, it means letting go of a goal that no longer serves you. Sometimes, it becomes about discovering new questions rather than finding answers.
Casey Insight #11: Sometimes we spend so much time searching for answers that we forget to experience the questions themselves.
“The point is to live everything. Live the questions now.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Life will keep changing, and your purpose can change with it. You don’t have to abandon everything you’ve built, but you can decide which parts of your life story still fit and which parts are ready for a new chapter.
And sometimes, the most important punch you deliver is the one that breaks you free from an old story.
Conclusion
You are a noun, but you are never just a noun. Your purpose is like an adjective, coloring who you are and helping you become more than the basic version of yourself.
You don’t have to face every punch life throws at you. You don’t even have to win every round.
What matters is staying engaged, learning when to move, knowing when to stand your ground, and remembering what kind of person you want to become. Sometimes we punch forward. Sometimes we flow around obstacles. Sometimes we pause and allow life to catch up with us. All these ways of engaging with life have value. The important thing is to stay connected to who you are becoming.
Your life is your story. Your purpose is how you choose to live it.
“Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
So, go out there and engage with life. Be kind, stay curious, and don’t forget to play along the way!
Want to explore this subject further? Here’s another article about the purpose of life.