"The greatest resource that humankind has is to be found within human life itself. This treasure can be endlessly mined and developed. To believe in and encourage youth, bringing out their wisdom and strength, this is the challenge and purpose of education." Daisaku Ikeda
I think this is the challenge and purpose of life, as well. I want to devote myself to this endeavor: to believe in and encourage humanity. To demonstrate gratitude for the gifts I've been given by using them to encourage and empower others. To help them both see their own potential and discover within themselves the strength and courage to fulfill it, so that they might realize truth, beauty and fullness. And I will thereby be doing the same for myself (oh, the illusion of altruism!), for such is a life of meaning, of purpose.
This is what compels me to strike out on the path that has perhaps always been there, laid out for me, but which I have been too timid, too lacking in faith, to acknowledge as my own. What a long, strange trip it's been...and it is my greatest hope that the road ahead will lead to even stranger things. I want to be astonished, enraptured, baffled and exasperated, by the sheer mystery of what it means to be human and alive. I want to exhaust myself...before I leave this place, as we all do in the end.
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