A few days ago after work I was fueling my car up at a gas station I normally avoid because it tends to have “bums” around it. It was the most convenient place to fill my tank though, so I stopped there.

Sure enough, not a minute after I pulled up, a homeless man approaches and starts talking to me. Ordinarily in these situations I’d avoid or ignore this man, or try to weasel my way out of talking to him somehow. Prior to the past two years of my life, I’d think nothing of just plain lying to him to get rid of him. He’d be a pebble in my shoe.

For me, my purpose is to bring these 4 words into the world in my every action; love acceptance, freedom, and enlightenment. Those words are what I choose as “my way of being.” When my actions are not aligned with that way of being, I know that I am not living my purpose and that I am not being the person I wish to be. So when this man started talking to me, my auto-pilot kicked in and I was repulsed and started to think of how I would get out of talking to him. Then I became conscious of my reaction and purposefully asked myself “am I being love, acceptance, freedom, and enlightenment?” The answer was no, and so in that instant I made another conscious action; I chose to be love, acceptance, freedom, and enlightenment and acted in accordance with being those things.

I looked this man in the eye and said “Hi!” as I would with an old friend or loved one. I allowed myself to be present to my automatic feelings and reactions to my interactions with this man, and chose not to act upon those things and instead act according to those 4 words. We ended up talking for about 5 minutes, all the while with me speaking to him as if he were an old friend instead of a bum, stranger, or lesser being.

His name was Bill. He’d been in prison and was released recently. He started writing poems in prison and kept doing it after being released, instead of going back to his life of drugs and petty crime. He said his poetry wasn’t very good but that he was still working on it. He wanted to write things that made people happy and brightened their day. He wanted to set an example to young people who were tending toward the darker side of life that they can choose not to make the mistakes he’d made. Bill was a very nice man, really polite, and very uneducated. He was putting his best foot forward, maybe as a ruse to get money from the people he approached, or maybe because he was sincere. It isn’t my place to judge his motives. He seemed pretty genuine to me but had obviously been hurt a lot and had been bitten in the past. It seemed that he felt the need to appear a certain way to the people he approached as a kind of survival mechanism. In those moments, he didn’t seem comfortable or happy, but in the moments when he seemed genuine, his face lit up and you could see inside his eyes there was a human being inside desperate to get out and show itself to the world. I think we all feel this way at times.

By stopping and consciously choosing to live my purpose, I saw humanity in a man I’d ignore without that purpose. I saw beauty that the vast majority ignore every day.

I let Bill share a couple of his poems with me and he was right, they weren’t very good poems. But they were beautiful because they were the truest expressions of who he was that he could create at that time in his life. I bought the poems he shared with me for $1 each, and thanked him for sharing them with me and wished him luck in the future, happy holidays, and told him not to give up with his poetry if it’s what helped him cope with his circumstances. I told him to keep making people’s day better and trying to make them feel happy.

He smiled as he walked away. If his purpose was to make others happy, he had done so by living his purpose and if my purpose is to bring love, acceptance, freedom and enlightenment into the world, I had done so by returning the favor and making his day.

That is what purpose gives to your life and the lives of all whom you touch. If Bill’s poor poetry makes me feel happy, that will carry on to my friends and family when I return home from work, and so on and so forth. It’s a great thing!

Indeed, without purpose, we are losing the right direction and that will eventually bring us nowhere, in life or in business. Certainly, I wouldn’t want to live out on other people’s purpose.

Oh, those quotes are superbly awesome. Thanks for sharing with us.

To our success
Yan