On finding my own life mission

Having been back home after almost a year in September and October, I faced quite a tough time acknowledging how much the society I grew up from had changed, more in the bad direction than good. But the most important thing I gained from that trip was a great discovery, my life mission. Today, when I read a blog of a friend about to go back to Vietnam and at the same time thinking about changing his job, I suddenly had an "Aha" moment. I realized that I would not have found the mission for my life should I hadn't been in touch with my root.

Self help books talk a lot about how to find a mission for one's life. Many of them talk about finding what you want to do in life and what you're good at, etc. Some mention values as selection criteria. Odd enough, one often has too many things one likes to do in life while quite a lot of uncertainty about one's true talents. As a consequence, personal mission seems to be the most difficult thing to find.

What I found out is that my root helped me to understand who I am and where I am from. Being with my family, teaching my son how to read and write, meeting my best friends, doing some social works that I used to spend a lot of time on, and even sitting in my favorite place in West lake... Now I know I brought together all the things I identified myself with and recalled the major decisions in my life. And exactly that time, with a little clue from a meeting with a few young, capable and energetic people, I found it!

I found my life's mission when I linked who I was, what choices I had made, and what I had done. The mission was nothing more than a natural extension of these factors, under the light of the new view of life and myself that I had. Being with the root helped me to single out what I really want to do in future. A personal mission is as much about the past and present, as about the future, now I know. And I remember Prof. Konsynski of Emory once told me: "if you know how to construct the past, you can see the future", what I had so much doubt about and had spent a full semester just to realize how true it was.

Uploaded in Heidelberg, Germany