The answer to the question about life’s purpose is so simple, so obvious, so close that it is almost impossible to see. After years and decades of questioning and studying all kinds of wisdom traditions, taking therapy including psychoanalysis, working as coach and consultant and living a life of almost 47 years I had this simply insight: The purpose of life is to fully enjoy it. To enjoy it while it is lasting, to notice and enjoy the beauty of life and nature and the universe and to express that joy through life. Consciousness is the universe experience itself.

Ultimately “my life” is not “my” life, I am just one expression of life, I am life. I don’t have a life, I am life being alive. With our consciousness and ability to notice and experience ourselves we are able to witness and enjoy life around us. Our noticing of beauty, order, patterns, nature, colors gives meaning to it. Just imagine the sadness of a beautiful flower florishing and nobody there to notice, smell and enjoy it. 

In order to enjoy life fully, I had to learn to deeply notice beauty, to be very present and aware to what is around and to cultivate a sense of openness, receptiveness and gratefulness to the gifts around me. Enjoying life has nothing to do with consumption, things I have, cheap pleasure or external success. I got to realize, that we don’t need this things in order to enjoy live, but we need so many stuff and things because we are not joyful. Our inability to appreciate, notice and enjoy what life has to offer, in its extraordinary and voluptous simplicity, makes us believe it is not enough and pushes us oftentimes in life situations that make us feel depleeted, miserable, depressed and stressed.

We are striving for happiness because we cannot enjoy the process as it is happening. Over time I started to understand, that happiness is not a state of being, but the ability to enjoy  the process life every moment. 

Enjoying life not only when it is easy, comfortable and free of challenges.

On the contrary, even the most challenging situations can be a source of joy, because they show us our potential and we can rise above and beyond our own boundaries. We love to grow and experience our unknown abilities, they don’t show up on the comfy couch. (most of the time). 

Being able to enjoy life needs some mastery and practice, like ballroom dance. If we still neeed to think and stumble with every step it is not great, but over time, with practice, we get to the state where we enjoy the dance, and the whole purpose of the dance is to enjoy it, not to get anywhere, not to reach a goal or to prove anything to anyone. 

Enjoying the beauty of life is for me our highest duty, it is the way to honor what the Universe and life was able to create and bring about. Our job as humans is to witness it with joy and further and support life wihtin and around us.

People who fully and deeply enjoy life are not only doing well but also doing well.

Oftentimes they have professions that further and support life, they are ADDING to the WHOLE and not EXTRACTING from the WHOLE, a beautiful distinction I have learned from Holist philosopher Claudius van Wyk. 

Many people I have met who fully enjoy their lives might not be rich in terms of materialistic possessions (altough they might), but they are billionaires in terms of positive life energy they cultivate in themselves and others.

For me personally this becomes a commitment and while I think that the purpose of my life is to become a master of enjoying it, the meaning of my life is to create physical and emotional spaces to help other people to enjoy their lives too. Maybe this is just enough for one life.