LJ Idol - DW - 1: "It's hard to beat a person who never gives up." (~750 words)
When you are a child, your life is easy, because it has a purpose, or at least a lack of understanding that you need one.
My childhood purpose in life, implicitly set by my parents, was simple: grow up, study, get an education, find work... and then all will be good and proper.
I followed this road, only somewhere along the way, I discovered that no goal in life mysteriously appears out of the fog of adulthood.
You grow up (check).
You study (check, eternal student achievement unlocked).
You get an education (check, two Masters degrees and a number of further-education and self-study courses).
You find occupation (check, been working in the same organisation since obtaining my first Masters).
And then you flounder. The nice people you are working with obviously have a purpose, but it is not written anywhere, it is not stated out loud, and nor is it implied in the tasks you perform as a junior member of the team.
You ask around, feebly, about this purpose, but you are not heard, are not understood, because your problem is alien to the older generation, and you are too young, too awkward, and too much in the dark already to yell, shout, insist that you are lost and need to be shown a guiding light, and be answered. And this, because you are ashamed. Ashamed to show that your new education had not taught you the most important thing of all.
You stay with the good people you have found, because you have no purpose of your own, and no burning need for change, and because you are lost and ashamed. And for years you exist without really living, only finding short-lived purpose in short-lived outside projects.
And then you realize, subconsciously in the beginning, that the Purpose will not magically appear in your darkness in a burst of heavenly light. That you have to find it, somehow, and that only you can do so. That it does not revolve around your work, but your life as a whole. And that, the most confusing of all, your rational mind, the one your education, and conscious thoughts, have been training all these long years, will not help you in your quest, because that which you are looking for is to it transcendental. That too many of your own, other people's and society's morals, ideals and compasses are foggy, transient and questionable, some objectionable and others downright harmful.
Pundits say: do not steal. Your society punishes with three years in prison a homeless person for stealing a tin of food worth two hundred and lets go with a slap on the wrist and a one-year suspended sentence the scoundrel who took hundreds of thousands from the orphans.
Your country's constitution proclaims freedom of speech. Your country's authorities slap criminal charges for extremism and seeding racial hatred on young people who repost memes mocking religion and those in power on their, already months deleted, social media accounts with less than three dozen subscribers.
You try and you try to find your purpose, to reconstruct a system of beliefs that will hold you afloat, but again and again, your castle of sand comes down and you question anew.
Yet at the same time you start to find here and there small things that no matter how you question and turn them left, right, upside down and inside out, always hold true, no matter what others do with them, no matter everything else.
I will not organize events to "punish" someone who has offended me. I will not pretend, and lie, and premeditate hurtful things to hurl at and do to them. I have seen people do it, and prepare it, and think nothing of it, and I will only say, their choice.
I always look to the better selves of people. No mater how many others caution me about some specific individual, I accept the possible consequences of seeing them thus, and do it (they scare me, the warnings, sometimes they scare me stiff). And I have never yet run across such consequences.
There exist a few other things here and there, but the two above I can write out in the full knowledge that I hold myself to them.
...You find these anchoring rocks, and maybe you build something.
I wouldn't know yet. My purpose looms somewhere close in the fog, but its true form escapes me.