I grew up as a person motivated by goals. Scoring A’s on a report card, winning a spelling bee, achieving a diploma (or two or three), getting promoted at work, publishing a poem, or running a full 26+ mile marathon (who, me?) Check those boxes, Girl!

As of now, from the perspective of my 75+ years, many of those goals have faded into the past, dimmer than my ideal weight on a Weight Watchers chart. I’m wondering how a lifetime of meeting goals has prepared me for the unknown number of days or years ahead. Realistically, it’s a little late for me to set a new goal like starting a small business or running for public office (although I note in the news there are plenty of other geezers doing those things). What’s going to make the time I have left interesting, creative, productive, or just plain enjoyable? Let’s call it a sense of purpose.

In my Roget’s Thesaurus, the word purpose is located in Category 543. Meaning. You can find it further connected with resolution, intention, and function. Meaning is tough to pin down, yet somehow it comes down to what matters, if anything, about my milliseconds alive in the flow of Earth’s history, my infinitesimal presence in what may be an infinite universe.

Time for another cup of coffee. This thought process requires a lot of caffeine.

Bob the Cat assumes her post-breakfast position, asleep on the rug in the hall outside my door, where she can occasionally look up and watch me hunched over my computer. In cat years, she may be older than I am. Besides sleep, she cares about only two things: food above all, and a lap to curl up in whenever she craves human connection. Maybe three things if you count clean fur, as I watch her thoroughly and intensively licking her entire body.

To be clean and fed and lovingly cuddled: not bad for a way of life. For millions of human beings on the planet, these would be blessings a-plenty if they had them.

What about Meaning? Purpose? I think of the 20th century American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who placed the essential requirements for human fulfillment in a hierarchy. These requirements were sometimes (though not by Maslow) arranged on a pyramid diagram, which made it appear that one must work one’s way up from a base of physical needs to a rarefied peak of—-what? Spirituality? Non-being? Nirvana? The top of the pyramid is labeled transcendence.

Looking up and down the pyramid, I think how fortunate I am, already living rather high up. Do I still yearn for transcendence—the tiny triangle at the top? Is that where my Purpose lies for the rest of my time, with all my interim goals checked off below?

In the thesaurus, transcendence is listed as Category 36. Superiority. Superiority over what or whom, I wonder? The conviction of Superiority has not proven to be a successful strategy for human relations since the beginning of everything in history or mythology. So…not that.

I decide to ditch the pyramid. I’d prefer to think of transcendence as a pre-existing condition. Not at the bottom of anything, nor at the top, but more there than anything else on that list of human needs. Transcendence soaking the entire pyramid like water in a sponge. Transcendence dissolving the pyramid into the primeval sea of Creation itself.

Maybe it’s what Wordsworth was talking about in his Ode with the tongue-twister title: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting,/And cometh from afar:/Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God who is our home….” According to Wordsworth, we’re born transcendent, and immediately (sadly) forget.

Or perhaps you, like me and millions of others, once came across the much-reprinted poem by Max Ehrmann titled Desiderata. “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and stars; you have a right to be here.”

Or Paul Tillich’s assertion in a sermon that profoundly changed my life: Grace strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life….and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted…by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know….Do not seek for anything. do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted….”*

Or the hymn by George Matheson that I want sung at my memorial service: “O Love that will not let me go/I rest my weary soul in Thee;/I give Thee back the life I owe,/That in Thine ocean depths its flow/May richer, fuller be.”

My lifetime of words seems to have brought me a great deal of evidence, a great many witnesses, for the idea that life matters—specifically my life–beyond all goals and purposes. I do not have to do anything to be loved. It’s relaxing to think this—to remember my original—one might say God-given–transcendence.

I think I hear the voice of Wordsworth: Girl, you got this.

*Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948.