Purpose

Today’s daily prompt on WordPress is Purpose. I would like to share with you my beautiful teenager’s theory on Purpose. She thinks that the purpose of life for all (people and animals alike) is to achieve happiness and to avoid suffering. Sounds Buddhist doesn’t it? She thinks that every one of our actions can be unravelled to one underlying motive: to achieve happiness. She reminds me of this daily with practical examples: ‘our sewage system is there because open sewage would cause illness, disease, would be smelly and unsightly. So building the infrastructure around sewage is there to help us avoid ill health and suffering and to keep us healthy and ultimately happy.’ This is the mindset of empathy. Because it enables you to see other people’s actions and words through the lens of ‘purpose’. ‘They had done that or said that because it helps them to achieve happiness and/or to avoid suffering’. Can I, as a human being, empathise with that? The answer more often than not is: yes.