My Purpose

December 5, 2008

We had a session today that was supposed to wrap up this course on environment.  The most important part of this session was about figuring out how we will make changes in our own lives after we leave India.  We were asked to draw a tree of life.  Different parts of the tree are supposed to represent certain parts of your life.  The roots are what you want to hold on to (family, friends, strong relationship, hope, and faith), the trunk and branches are what you want to experience or do differently (do more outside, be a kid again, travel, love more, walk barefoot, remember what makes life so special, shop less), the fruits of the tree are your dreams or things you want to discover (the world, myself, find true happiness everyday) and the dead branches are the things that I want to let go (sadness, hate, greed).  This tree of life was difficult to do and I had to think about what I wanted to write for a long time.  I had a hard time understanding what this exercise had to do with the environment course.  It made me wonder about what is the purpose/meaning of my life, not the environment.  I will be done with college in 13 days and I really wish that I knew the next step in my journey.  I have felt so lost for the last 6 months and India has just added more questions for me, and has provided so few answers.  I keep thinking about this experience and wondering how it is going to change my life and what I will do with all of this information.  I just haven’t come up with anything yet.  I wish that life was easy sometimes but I don’t know if it would be as much fun if everything came easy. I have a strong feeling that I really won’t know how this has changed me until after I get back to the states.