How Integration Could Add More Meaning To Your Life

Why you should stop looking for your life purpose

For most people, we are exposed to the idea of meaning either in our 20s or when we have some event that shakes our reality.

For me, the first time I ever got exposed to the idea of finding meaning in my life was, believe it or not, in 2005 when I was 12 years old. I had just lost my mother. I couldn’t understand how people could smile or even party after she was gone.

I remember the name, Thierry Henry. It was a big name in football as the then Arsenal star was an idol to kids my age. I remember that as my mother’s lifeless body lay belly up in the coffin in my parents’ sitting room, people elsewhere were talking about Thierry Henry and how he had put Arsenal on the map.

Some part of me felt like everyone, yes including Thierry Henry, should have stopped what they were doing that day to come and send off my mother.

I also made a contract to myself (that I have broken since then) that I will never be happy again without her. Even with my 12-year-old view of the world, I could see how painful it was for my dad despite the facade he kept on to appear strong.

It was through this experience that questions showed up for me. You know, those questions about the meaning of life.

It was then that I started picking up my dad’s self-help books because I felt drawn to them. There was a whole shelf to keep me busy although I have to admit most of those books were about monetary policy and all forms of advanced accounting.

To this day, I have no idea why I loved reading them so much together with the real self-help stuff but I know that I found them comforting, and by the time I got to the minor seminary at 14, I had got what I thought was my life purpose — Becoming a priest.

For the next 4- 5 years from 2007 to 2011, this idea would consume me. I felt aligned with it. I even knew my exact date of priestly ordination which at that time I thought would be in August of 2021.

Well, until I got expelled from the seminary. The ease by which I was let go shook me at the core. It made me realize that becoming a priest may have been possible but that possibility had nothing to do with being my life purpose.

Adding meaning to life through life purposes

There are many ways in which people embark on the journey of finding meaning in their lives.

Some people use spirit guides, meditation, books, yoga, regression, and so on.

I can’t speak to the validity of any of these practices in helping you find what you consider your life purpose as a channel to add meaning to your life. I know that some of these practices are very helpful in helping you achieve a higher level of satisfaction with your life in one form or another.

Therefore, sure, through these practices, you can attach meaning to your life but that does not mean that what gives you that meaning is your life purpose.

Therefore you may take up an assumed life purpose as a way of adding meaning to your life through these practices. That is fine as long as you recognize that the life purpose that is giving you that meaning is only assumed and not absolute.

Why it may benefit you to stop searching for your life purpose

The answer is in knowing the difference between an assumed life purpose and an absolute life purpose.

Assumed life purpose: That individual role that you assume in your life to address any given undertaking. (e.g your job, your company, your initiative, your family…)

Absolute life purpose: The collective role of several assumed life purposes you played in your life and how those shape your character and quality of being.

We often mistake these assumed life purposes as being our absolute life purposes.

When I was in the seminary, I found meaning in my life because I thought my life purpose(absolute life purpose) was being a priest.

This of course was not true. Had I become a priest. It would still not be true. It would only still be an assumed life purpose. Today, I am an engineer, writer, artist, musician, and so on. But none of these are my life purposes(absolute life purposes). They simply are my assumed life purposes.

At the end of my life, they collectively will all have contributed to shaping my absolute life purpose.

The nature of your absolute life purpose is unknowable (at least within the confines of logical human understanding). It works at the spirit level and you get to it through your internal guidance system. — In other words, what feels right to you in relation to your moral compass.

Dangers of finding meaning through the search for your life purpose

In regards to this, the only danger is fragmentation.

I merely use the term “fragmentation” to refer to a split in the various aspects of your being in relation to those aspects’ development.

Let's take a rich man for example who thinks his life purpose is to clean oceans and make the world less polluted.

This person may have a lot of money to significantly help in cleaning oceans and improving air quality around the world.

But he may fail in other aspects of his life. For instance, he might fail to make time for his family and relationships which could lead to a divorce or having children grow up without knowing much about their father.

His error was in the failure to recognize that what he thought was his life purpose was only an assumed life purpose that improved maybe the hardworking part of his being.

But ignoring the assumed life purpose of family responsibility made him unable to hold down a family or develop aspects to do with commitment, empathy, and consideration as far as his family is concerned.

A career is only an assumed life purpose. Good for you if you are great at it. But always keep in mind that it does not define you and it is not your life purpose — In the absolute sense.

Following your internal guidance system

When you try to cling to one thing, you always feel that something is missing. This is your internal guidance system that keeps reminding you of the assumed nature of your “life purpose.”

The splits and conflicts between what you are doing with your life and where you feel like you need to go are a result of the fragmentation of the various aspects of your being.

Each must be ideally addressed but the more you do it, the more you minimize the regret — Or to put it clearly, the closer you get to achieving your absolute life purpose. This is how you follow your internal guidance system.

Therefore, if you feel that a career limits you in any way that’s unbearable, your effort should be put into setting up ways that will allow you to leave that career and seek something else.

You address your fears first and once those are taken care of, then you go for your hopes.

For example, quitting your job to go plant trees may be a burning desire. But before you do that, consider addressing the fears of how you will take care of yourself.

That means, savings, a more flexible job, or a side hustle could help you, and therefore, you should first attain any of those as a means that addresses your fears and when that is done, then you go for the tree planting thing.

Remember, planting trees or making the earth greener is only your assumed life purpose, just as much as every little thing you do to get you there. Therefore addressing the fears also helps you tap into and learn from other assumed life purposes along the way that eventually make you more suited to deal with the assumed life purpose that you care about.

Integration: An alternative way to create meaning in your life

While most people assume that we find meaning through finding our life purpose (absolute life purpose) clearly my ideas reject this assumption.

This is because trying to find what that absolute life purpose is will always fail the seeker as it leaves him or her with a lot of other unfulfilled wishes.

At one point, you can find something that you really love doing and you do it for the rest of your life. That would be cool. But whether you find it or not, you must also attend to other aspects of your being as the desires present themselves.

This is what I call integration.

In this, you constantly try to harmonize experiences as well as explore alternative paths that interest you.

In the integration approach, you remove all stubborn attachment to anything and seek to harmonize your relationship with everything as they come up in your awareness.

For example, if you are working in a specific job, if a task comes from a different job that requires your attention, you attend to it instead of saying that it isn’t your line of work.

Or when it comes to human relationships, you dissolve the need to draw lines between you and other people based on race, culture, beliefs, opinions, and so on. You instead seek to find common ground amidst these differences.

The integration is about fighting nothing that your awareness seeks to explore. And, we are human beings, so we know what to explore within the limits of what's morally acceptable. Therefore, I do not feel like it's necessary to mention that you need to be a good human being when doing so.

Through this integration approach, I find that the meaning I attach to my life is more enduring than that which I find while trying to attach my identity to false life purposes.

Conclusion

Given the inherently ambitious nature of life, I do not think that we are just going to find comfort in knowing our life purposes, especially at young ages. Maybe later on in life beyond 60, that may usher in a lot of comforts and a higher sense of purpose. Someone once called that stage, the f*ck it stage of life.

Regrets are minimal or less painful, by then people have explored various aspects of life more than the 20 or 30-year-olds, and am sure that people in this age bracket (60+) have much more appreciation for life than the younger people.

We could therefore say that, maybe, just maybe, those people have some idea that gets closer to understanding what goes into having a meaningful life. Maybe.

But in any case, regardless of age, integrating various aspects of our life, and finding harmony amidst conflicting experiences can help us add more meaning to our lives.

We can let go of the quest to find our life purposes as a means to a meaningful life, and instead, we can substitute that quest for the quest of integration. One that strives to learn how to love, understand and appreciate all that life has to offer.