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Reflection Title: You Can’t Run from Your Purpose!

Book – The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Reflection:
I struggle a lot with “learning” through pure fiction novels like The Song of Achilles. You’ll notice that I rarely read fiction books for this exact reason. Fiction lessons are abstract at best, and I feel like I’m often grasping at straws to find a nugget to apply to my life. Nonfiction, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction books usually have an overt point to get across to the reader most of the time. That makes it “easier” for me to learn, which is what this whole journey mainly about and exercising my “Learn Something New Every day” value.

However, in keeping with some of my other values and “trying to not do this alone”, I met a new colleague at a work dinner who was an avid reader, and he recommended this book as one of his top 5 favorites. I figured I would “challenge myself”, another one of my core values, and get out of my nonfiction comfort zone for this one and see what I found.

What I found was a beautifully written story and a highly entertaining adventure filled with the full spectrum of human emotion. What I didn’t find, was an easy lesson or key take away to apply to my life. I really was struggling with figuring out what I learned and was racking my brain for a few hours after finishing. I went and spoke with my wife and explained to her my dilemma. I told her all about the story and recapped it as best as I could. I told her, “I really enjoyed it, but what was the point?” She offered up a few ideas, but they just didn’t seem to stick or felt forced.

I happened to finish this book on a Sunday morning. On Sunday’s, I always go and visit with Emilia at the cemetery for a few minutes to talk about life, Living for 2 that week, and think about the week to come. On this day, we talked about what I learned from this book? I was honestly lost and needed some help.

After talking it over with Emilia, I walked away from the cemetery knowing what I wanted to write about the following morning…DON’T RUN AWAY FROM YOUR PURPOSE!

Having a true purpose in this world, in my opinion, is rare and special. Purposes are something that we all want, crave, and often spend a lifetime seeking. Purposes are extremely powerful. It is my belief that purposes are not acquired, they find you. I may be wrong about this, but I truly think most people’s purposes come to you in your most painful moments. Why? Because pain has a way in stripping everything away from you that you care about until only 1 thing emerges in your mind. That one thing is your purpose.

It's ironic, we seemingly spend our whole life searching for purpose, but when it finds us, we often don’t want it…I know I don’t. I’d give mine back in heartbeat if it meant I got to spend the rest of my life with my daughter by my side. However, that’s the thing about purpose…once you have it, you can’t run from it no matter how hard you try. It will be there waiting for you until you acknowledge its existence and act. If you choose to run away, you will leave a path of destruction in your wake until that time comes when you choose to finally embrace your purpose.

This is exactly what I saw from Achilles in this beautiful story by Madeline Miller. He spent his whole life running from his purpose. He was selfishly trying to “protect” his loved ones from what they all knew was his inevitable outcome. In his selfishness, he caused a decades long war and let death and disease ravage his people as he refused to embrace it. Eventually, his hand was forced by fate, and he went kicking and screaming toward his purpose and left this world filled with regret of what his lack of action had brought.

If you are ever blessed (or cursed) to find yourself with a purpose in this life, you have 2 options. Embrace it head on and live the life you are called to live, or run away and leave a wake of destruction in your path. No matter which choice you make, that purpose isn’t going away. It will find you one way or another.

Achilles choose to pretend his purpose didn’t exist and it caused the ones around him to pay the price for his neglect. I will not make that same mistake. I will not let my daughter, wife, son, family, friends, or myself down. I will take this pain and make something beautiful of it to honor my daughter. Otherwise, losing Emilia will have been for nothing and I can never let that be.

Question: Are you running away from your purpose like Achilles or choosing to embrace it head on?