One question I struggled with for a long time was What’s my goal in life? What am I supposed to be doing? What’s the end game?

Having played sports all my life there was always a goal – Practice to win games – Win games to win the championship. As I got older, however, I started thinking – There’s really no ultimate championship – There will always be another – It was like a big circle.

What about life – What’s the goal for life? For a while my goal was to help others. I wanted the perfect job or the perfect volunteer experience. Slowly, however, I realized there will always be people to help. No matter what job I had or what I did, ultimately I wasn’t going to change anything. And even if I did, who was to say it was for the better. It was like a big circle.

After doing many laps around the circle, it finally occurred to me that I was asking the wrong question. It’s not the doing that matters. It’s the being. We don’t do for the results. We do to become. By that I mean the doing exists for one ultimate purpose – to create us. The championships come and go. But how we act stays with us – it becomes us. It’s not the stuff we give to those in need that matters. The stuff comes and goes. It’s the act of giving that stays with us – that becomes us.
And if it’s our being that ultimately matters, the real question then becomes by what standard are we creating our being.

We create ourselves through our decisions. But what are the standards by which we make our decisions? Do we want to create ourselves as happy? Then we look at the upside of events. Do we want to be rich? Then we focus our decisions on accumulation. Do we want to be generous? Then we look for opportunities to give. There’s no right or wrong standard. What matters is that we decide what our standard is.

Many of us, however, never ask that question. We never decide the standards by which we want to create ourselves. And when we don’t, we let society’s default answer become our default standard. And that is: to live long and prosper. When we live by society’s default answer, we live on auto-pilot making decisions based on living a long life and accumulating status and wealth. Society’s default answer comes at us everyday. It’s easy to let it become our own. It takes awareness and vigilance to live by our own, predetermined standards.

Where do you stand? Have you created your own standards? Or are you on auto-pilot? At the end of your life will that be enough?

Your time is now.

Timothy Velner is a husband, father, attorney and author living in Minneapolis. You can follow his daily blog – a series of discussions between the worry-self and the present-self at – thespiritualgym.me