Before we go into this great and not so trivial Best of Erik, I want to share the beautiful weather we’re experiencing in our last day up in the mountains above the tree line. Tomorrow, we drive to Oslo and we take off Sunday early in the morning so I son’t be posting again until Monday.
Me: Here’s a very simple one again. Are there any keys to fulfilling one’s life purpose?
Jamie and I laugh.
Erik: Ah, yeah. If I had to give one basic key, it’d be ultimate honesty. Honesty with self, honesty with others, honesty with environment, honesty with your needs—with everything.
Me: Wow.
Erik: And that’ll make people go from fifth gear to reverse, cuz they’ll have to back up and correct themselves constantly until they can understand the idea that they can only ask, “What is truth?”
Me: Mm hm.
(Long pause)
Me: Keep adding to that, because I can’t just fill up a whole post with this. Can you expound on it?
Erik: Seriously? What? Do we have to lay out examples?
Me: That might help, yes. Whatever it takes, but I can’t just put a few sentences in one post. It makes me feel guilty. Otherwise I’ll just have to put a bunch of images at the end!
Erik: But Mom, I thought we had to do it in two sentences or less!
Me: No, no! I was just kidding back then!
Erik chuckles at me for falling for his teasing, hook, line and sinker.
Erik: Well, the thing that gets in people’s way is—let’s say when you meet someone. You don’t really jive—
Jamie (giggling at his word choice): Jive? For real, Erik?
Erik (purposely ignoring her): —with them. You don’t get along with them right away. They’re really nice, but, you know, you just don’t really understand them or you just don’t feel like you have the time for them, and you just wanna get away. So, you just say, “I’m sorry, I have something else I have to do. It’s really nice to meet you. Take care!” And you drop it.
Me: Okay. What’s wrong with that?
Erik: Well, many things could have been corrected. First of all, you should have said to the person, “Wonderful meeting you,” if that’s a truth. If it’s not wonderful meeting the person, you can just say, “Wow, this is awkward timing that we’re being introduced.”
I’m thinking this is a TERRIBLE pick up line. Damn!
Erik: You don’t have to throw it down and be rude. You don’t have to take honesty into a way where it’s going to make you look like some evil demon or freak of nature.
Me: And you don’t want to hurt people. Of course not. What purpose would that serve?
Erik: Yeah, but you don’t want to sacrifice your own truth as well. So, you know, you say what it is, but the point of the example is: you should have been able to say to the person, “I don’t understand where you’re coming from. I’m actually really uncomfortable right now. You seem like a really nice person, I just don’t really know how to handle the situation, and I have some other things on my mind. I would love if you’d give me the opportunity to walk away and handle what’s on my plate, and I hope this gets resolved later. I hope we’ll meet later” or “I don’t want to talk about this later. You don’t fit where I’m headed right now.”
(Sounds like this guy is NOT getting any tonight. Just sayin’)
Me: Okay.
Erik: Just make resolutions through your own honesty as you move through your day. Don’t leave this shit hanging. People leave shit hanging all the time thinking that time is gonna just, I don’t know, resolve it for them. But it’s just a bunch of pussies that won’t make their own deal.
Me: Yeah, I guess we humans are a bunch of pussies. But it’s scary over here. You remember that, don’t you, Erik?
Erik: Like it was yesterday.
Jamie: That’s a great t-shirt.
Me: I know! All right, what about honesty with the environment. Tell me about that. I don’t understand. Is it like vegans wearing leather shoes?
Erik: Yeah, because that’s going against the person’s belief system. But no, if you don’t like how something is, don’t stay in it. If you don’t like how your environment is laid out like your office, change it. If you can’t change it, hire somebody to change it for you. If you don’t like a color—if you walk in and see that artwork everyday and it’s not really your thing, why are you keeping it? It’s a material possession! Just because grandma gave it to you or that it’s worth $40,000 doesn’t mean you need to be holding on to it.
Me: I’d sell it and pocket the dough!
Erik: Bingo, I would, too! But some people won’t. They make themselves suffer and not let themselves be in complete honesty with their environment.
Me: Yeah. Definitely.
(Do I sound like Rain Man to you?)
Erik: And really when you’re honest, you’re supporting yourself.
Me: True.
Erik: It’d all be a better world if we would all do that. Hell, if we could just get two out of ten people in the world to do it!
Me: Exactly. How does one find one’s life purpose. Do we all have a particular life’s purpose and if so, why?
Erik: Cha, we all have a purpose. But the thing is you can’t think of a purpose as always being just, you know, rocket scientist—like AMAZING! CHANGE THE FACE OF A NATION!
Jamie and I laugh.
Erik: Our purpose isn’t always that. It might be to save a species of frogs. It might be to make your daughter smile on July 11th, 2040. Our purpose might be just a single moment in time. It might not stretch over a complete lifetime. And some people’s purpose is to come back and just experience laughter and enjoy and people look at them and they don’t know how to measure them, because they’re just a bit of a slice of light. They really don’t know how to grasp them, and they think they’re just off the charts. Well, that’s the purpose.
Me: Mm hm.
(Long pause)
Me: But—
Erik: Why do we all have one?
Me: Yeah!
Erik: Cuz everything has direction. Even people who feel like they have no direction—that’s actually a direction.
Me: Ah!
Erik: And with direction comes purpose. That’s what life on Earth is all about—having that purpose, heading to that moment of destiny. But yet having that ticket of free will is what gives everybody the right to be exactly who they are.
Me: Well, why do people feel like they have no direction? Is it because free will bumps them off the path, but they eventually get to their destination anyway?
Erik: But Mom, no direction is a direction. Their purpose may be to just come and sit and observe.
Me: Okay.
Erik: And that’s their purpose, to observe, because in that they gain the most information. But as soon as they experience it, they become numb to it, and they fall out.
Me: Oh.
Erik: Like fall out of their understanding or their knowing or their knowledge. They lose it. So, they have to get back to observing which, in their point, is lack of action, doing nothing, and having no direction. That’s bullshit. If you’re here, you have relationships. You cannot exist on Earth and not have a relationship.
Me: Even if it’s a relationship with what you observe. Through observation.
Erik: Yes. Yes. And for some people, that’s what they’re here for. That’s their life purpose this time around.
Me: Okay.
Erik: You have connections. You can’t be on Earth and be disconnected.
(Pause)
Erik: You may have those emotions of feeling disconnected, but it’s really not that reality.
Me: But we’re also here to be separate, so I guess being separate is what you need to have connections or to realize that you have connections. You can’t have connections if you’re not separate at least in some way.
Erik: You’re finally getting it.
Me: Wonders never cease. Okay, but free will knocks us off course sometimes, right? Off of our purpose.
Erik: Yeah, I guess it gives us the right to go off.
Me: Yeah, but eventually—
Erik: It all routes back around; it all will make sense; we all get to where we’re supposed to go no matter what detours we make.
Me: So it’s okay. It’s all okay.
Erik: Yes.
Me: There’s no right or wrong; there’s no wrong path.
Erik: Exactly!
Me: So, how does one find one’s life purpose?
(Pause)
Me: I guess they’re already on it, right?
Erik: Yes.
Jamie (laughing): Erik was being a bit of a booger saying you get out a map; you get out a compass, a right angle and a pencil. (pause) And then you just take a shit on it and walk away.
Me: Erik!
Jamie and I giggle.
Erik: Seriously, you don’t have any material pull to tell you where the fuck you’re going. How do you find it? Well, you do what you just did before which I said was: Become honest with yourself. That’s how you find it.
Me: Ah! And we come full circle.
Erik: If everyone were to follow their own honesty, it wouldn’t make everybody turn into some enlightened spiritual robot, and we all behave the same.
Me: Yeah, good. Stepford Wife-ish.
Erik: That’ll never happen. In fact, that’s what the fuck our culture and our society does to us. It makes us want to march the same and look the same and be the same. But when we start paying attention to our inner light, our inner God, our inner honesty—all the same fuckin’ thing—then we become uniquely different but extremely powerful and bright. All these bright lights shine together, but they definitely don’t all march together.
Me: Wow.
Throughout Erik’s monologue, I fully expected him to break out into song. Kumbaya?
Erik (in a monotone voice): We don’t all become droids because we’re all on the right path.
I chuckle.
Erik: We become uniquely different, and it makes the world better.
Me: Ah! Sounds inviting. Sounds hopeful.
