When I was sixteen, I received a beautiful gift from a friend who was visiting from Canada.
It was a figurine of Radha and Krishna, the divine couple.
I placed it on my altar, and every time I walked past it, I felt a deep sense of adoration. I would stop and notice it.
I did this often.
Every day.
I noticed their postures. I noticed the ease in their expressions. I noticed the beauty of the symbol itself. I noticed the way they seemed to be with one another.
I kept noticing.
At the time, I didn’t know what I was noticing.
I only knew that something about the figurine moved me.
Years later, I began a different kind of journey, one that started with a question:
What does it all mean?
What does life mean?
What does purpose mean?
What are we actually here to do?
And slowly, some wisdom began to appear for me:
Life is your relationship with now.
The purpose of life is to fall in love with the present moment.
I began to see Radha and Krishna differently.
Perhaps they were never two separate people in the figurine.
Perhaps they were pointing toward a relationship.
A non-dual approach to purpose itself.
The relationship between consciousness and existence.
Between awareness and what is here.
Between the one who experiences and the experience itself.
Because when we fall deeply in love with what is in front of us—even in the most mundane moments—something begins to happen.
We become available.
We notice.
We become curious.
We are moved.
And movement stirs creativity.
A sudden impulse appears.
An idea arrives.
A desire to make something.
A desire to speak to someone.
A desire to walk somewhere.
A question emerges.
Something begins to move through us.
This is why I have come to believe that beauty is so important.
Beauty is not simply decoration.
Beauty is one of the ways consciousness becomes intimate with existence.
Mathematics can be beautiful.
Nature can be beautiful.
Architecture can be beautiful.
Music can be beautiful.
A face can be beautiful.
A gesture can be beautiful.
A moment can be beautiful.
And when something is beautiful to us, we don’t simply understand it.
We are affected by it.
We let ourselves be moved.
Perhaps this is one of the great creative practices available to us:
Let yourself be moved.
Too often, we search for meaning somewhere other than where life actually is.
We anticipate the next relationship.
The next career.
The next achievement.
The next version of ourselves.
The next destination.
And in doing so, we can become separated from the beauty and beingness of the moment we are actually living.
We begin living from anticipation rather than presence.
Presence, however, does not mean the absence of action.
It means alignment.
It is from presence that aligned action can emerge.
When we are truly here, we can respond to what is actually happening rather than constantly acting from an imagined future.
This is where purpose begins to look different.
I remember watching a conference with BK Shivani, a teacher associated with the Brahma Kumaris’ Raja Yoga tradition. She shared a phrase that I had heard before but had never really understood:
Put your dharma into your every karma.
I have come to understand this differently now.
Perhaps dharma isn’t only some grand calling waiting somewhere in the future.
Perhaps dharma is the quality of being that you bring into whatever you are doing.
It is what I felt in my body when I looked at that figurine.
Beauty.
Awe.
Wonder.
Devotion.
Intimacy.
Presence.
A sense of being completely absorbed in something without needing to possess it.
I didn’t know it then, but perhaps I was already experiencing something about purpose.
Not as a career.
Not as an achievement.
Not as a five-year plan.
But as a relationship with life.
What if purpose is not something we find outside ourselves?
What if purpose is what becomes revealed when we become intimate enough with the life that is already here?
The way you speak to someone.
The way you prepare food.
The way you walk through nature.
The way you listen.
The way you make something.
The way you look at a person you love.
The way you respond to an ordinary Tuesday morning.
These are not interruptions to your purpose.
They are the place where purpose is lived.
Put your dharma into your karma.
Bring the quality of being that is most alive in you into the action that is actually in front of you.
This is why I return to the figurine.
Radha and Krishna were not simply an image of two people.
For me, they became an image of relationship itself.
A reminder that life is not something happening somewhere outside of us.
We are in relationship with it continuously.
And perhaps the deeper question is not:
What is my purpose?
But:
How am I relating to this moment?
Am I available?
Am I attentive?
Am I receiving?
Am I allowing myself to be moved?
Am I participating?
Am I bringing my inherent beauty into what is already asking for my attention?
Because perhaps purpose is not waiting for us in some distant future.
Perhaps it is being revealed through the quality of our relationship with now.
And perhaps this is what it means to fall in love with life.
Not to become passive.
Not to stop creating.
Not to stop aspiring.
But to become intimate enough with existence that our action begins to arise from presence rather than separation.
We don’t have to go somewhere else to begin.
There is already something here.
There is always something here.
Let yourself be moved by the life that is here.
And then notice what wants to happen next.
