Wellness Journalism: YOU ARE HERE.

According to LiveWell, Spiritual Wellness includes having a sense of purpose, finding joy in everyday experience, practicing honesty, and seeing beauty in life. Spiritual Wellness comes in every shape and size, unique to each person. It is central to happiness.

Sense of Purpose. That’s the general condition of knowing why you exist, or believing that you exist for a reason. It’s a very disconcerting quality to miss.

Say you walk into a house. The person in the living room looks up at you and asks, “What are you doing here?” If you have a good answer, you’re glad to be asked, and quick to inform. If you have don’t have a good answer, you’re having a very awkward moment.

Sense of Purpose, like economics, operates on a micro and macro scale.

Micro-Purpose: My sense of purpose at this moment involves writing this sentence in correct English. Later it will involve eating dinner and going to sleep. When aligned with my micro-purpose, I am relatively happy, calm, focused, and effective in carrying it out. If, however, my sense of purpose at the moment is in conflict with the reality I am experiencing, I may feel frustrated, angry, or unproductive.

Macro-Purpose: My sense of purpose on the whole involves relating with life in such a way as to make paying taxes and going to the dentist worthwhile. It involves cooking up a lifetime of joy and fulfillment. Macro-purpose is the sum of micro-purpose, but it can also stand on its own. A clear vision of the big picture can guide my little strokes. If I am aligned with my macro-purpose, I am happy, calm, focused, effective. If, on the other hand, my macro-purpose is missing or in conflict with my reality, I may find getting out of bed in the morning difficult, or I may require large amounts of mind-altering substances including white fudge-covered Oreos.

Your Sense of Purpose from moment to moment takes you through the day; your Sense of Purpose from day to day takes you through your life.

NOTE: Sense of Purpose changes over time, is challenged by circumstance, or even vanishes altogether. When the big picture gets blurry, focus on the details. Do the little things to the best of your ability. Really go for that deep clean when you brush your teeth, drive defensively, and drink lots of water. Conversely, when the details have you stumped, consider the big picture. Remember what your overall goals are, what you truly want, and where your heart is.

It’s my little theory that every living human being has a Sense of Purpose imprinted/hard-wired within. I figure if every cell in the body has a function and knows what to do, and the body is made of cells, that by some transitive or associative property or law of physics, everybody has a function. This does not immediately translate to harmonious living, as I have many times run into conflict between my sense of purpose and reality (more on this later). But it does give me the hope that, even on the worst days, my Sense of Purpose can always be recovered.