Most of the things we spend our time doing don’t make much difference to our lives: we devote a lot of energy to treading water. This is not a terrible thing because if we don’t tread water, we’ll drown. But what if we want to shift our attention from merely surviving to actually living?
It seems obvious that, before we can move from existing to living, we need to know what it means to actually live. However, this is a reality that is often overlooked — perhaps the most important step in leading a rewarding life is to know what it is we are actually trying to achieve. Before we can do that it’s like we’re just fumbling in the dark looking for the light switch.
What we want out of life and how to get it is staring us all straight in the face. If we’re not seeing it, it’s because we’re too afraid to look. If we do catch a glimpse of it, we might turn away before we can fully appreciate it. We can see insight meditation as an antidote to this problem. When we train in mindfulness, we are repeatedly directing the mind to observe our desires and fears so that we can uncover our real purpose in life.
Once we’ve sufficiently defined our long-term goals, success will follow as a matter of course because we will naturally gravitate to the correct path inline with our objectives.