What gives our lives weight and meaning?

As the years pass faster and faster and I re-visit the journals of my life, I notice the patterns, the ideas, the thoughts that continue to surface and bubble up from the floor of me. Today, I am bubbled out and I am left staring into the dark circles they leave at my feet. What had poked at me so many years ago, now digs its claws into me.

“Watch” it says, “as I shred away at the most basic components of humanity.”

My dark thoughts at the beginning of this new year are not new to me or unique and I am reminded of these words from the Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera writes:

“The myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing …

The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

I am living in search of an anchor. Something to center me, to give my life weight and substance, some burden that I feel compelled to lift and carry. Not so much for meaning as for some spine around which I can weave the experience of being alive.

I often feel envious of those people who seem to have been born into their callings, people who appear genetically bred to become musicians or architects or political leaders, people who have always known what it is they want to do in life. I am envious because I don’t know what my purpose is. I don't have a true cross to carry or a lifelong axe to grind, although I've had my share of pain and tragedy, decades actually, but I haven't let it consume me. But with that release is the irony that I am free and unbound, and sometimes that’s frustrating. Sometimes a limitless horizon is the greatest barrier of all.

But I do know this: I don’t want to live lightly, to exist and disappear and leave nothing behind. I read stories about cosmic struggles and heroic battles and epic quests and think, as unrealistic as they may be, that’s what I want out of life.

So, I’m searching. I’m looking for my anchor and for the balance point between living in the moment and living for a legacy.

What gives your life weight and substance? What are you searching for?