The Eternal Quest: Finding Purpose in Life from Ancient Times to the Modern Era. (S.shah)

 

Why do we exist? What gives our lives meaning? These fundamental questions have echoed through human consciousness since the dawn of civilization, yet in our age of unprecedented progress, many still find themselves searching for answers.

The Ancient Foundations of Purpose

Throughout history, humans have grappled with questions of meaning and purpose. Ancient civilizations found their answers in divine mandate, cosmic order, and community roles. The Greeks spoke of eudaimonia—human flourishing through virtue and excellence. Eastern philosophies emphasized harmony with nature and transcendence of suffering. Medieval societies found purpose through religious devotion and service to God and community.

For millennia, purpose was largely prescribed by external forces: family traditions, religious institutions, social hierarchies, and survival needs. People knew their place in the world because society, culture, and circumstances defined it for them.

The Modern Paradox: Progress Without Purpose

Today's landscape presents a fascinating paradox. We've achieved technological marvels our ancestors could never have imagined. We've conquered diseases, extended lifespans, connected globally, and created unprecedented wealth and opportunities. Yet surveys consistently show rising rates of anxiety, depression, and existential emptiness, particularly in developed nations.

This "progress paradox" stems from several factors:

The Burden of Choice: While our ancestors had limited options, we face an overwhelming array of possibilities. This freedom, while liberating, can be paralyzing. When everything is possible, how do we choose what matters?

Disconnection from Community: Traditional sources of meaning—extended families, religious communities, local neighborhoods—have weakened. We're more connected digitally yet more isolated personally than ever before.

The Achievement Trap: Modern society often equates purpose with professional success or material accumulation. When these external markers fail to provide lasting fulfillment, we're left questioning our worth.

Information Overload: Constant exposure to global problems and others' curated lives through social media can create feelings of inadequacy and overwhelm, making it harder to focus on what truly matters to us personally.

The Science of Purpose: What Research Reveals

Modern psychology has validated what ancient wisdom traditions long understood: having a sense of purpose is fundamental to human wellbeing. Research by scientists like Kendall Bronk at Claremont Graduate University shows that purpose is associated with better health, increased longevity, and even economic success.

But here's what's particularly encouraging: purpose isn't just something that happens to lucky people. It can be cultivated through deliberate practice and self-reflection.

Studies reveal that people find purpose through various pathways. Some discover it through hardship—transforming personal struggles into missions to help others facing similar challenges. Others find it through a more gradual process of education, experience, and reflection, often supported by caring relationships and community connections.

A Practical Roadmap to Purpose

Based on research and timeless wisdom, here's how you can begin or deepen your journey toward purposeful living:

1. Excavate Your Core Concerns

Start by asking yourself what you would change about the world if you had unlimited power. Don't censor yourself—let your imagination run free. Then consider these questions:

• What injustices make your heart ache?
• What problems do you find yourself discussing repeatedly?
• What issues do you read about even when you don't have to?

2. Clarify Your Deepest Values

Values are different from goals—they're the underlying principles that guide your choices. Take time to identify what matters most to you. Is it creativity, justice, connection, learning, security, adventure? Rank your top values and consider how they show up (or could show up) in your daily life.

3. Inventory Your Unique Gifts

We all possess a distinctive combination of talents, skills, experiences, and perspectives. Sometimes we're blind to our own strengths. Ask trusted friends, family members, or colleagues:

• What do you see as my greatest strengths?
• When have you seen me most energized and effective?
• What unique perspective do I bring to situations?

4. Experiment Through Service

Purpose isn't discovered solely through reflection—it's revealed through action. Volunteer for causes that interest you. Try different roles. Pay attention to what energizes versus drains you. The right fit will feel invigorating rather than burdensome.

5. Envision Your Legacy

Imagine yourself years from now, looking back on a life well-lived. What would you want to have contributed? How would you want to be remembered? This exercise helps clarify what truly matters to you beyond immediate concerns.

6. Cultivate Purpose-Supporting Emotions

Research shows that gratitude and awe naturally orient us toward contribution and meaning. Practice noticing beauty, expressing appreciation, and marveling at the world around you. These positive emotions provide the emotional fuel for purposeful action.

7. Find Your Inspiration Network

Identify people whose contributions inspire you—both famous figures and everyday heroes in your community. Study their paths, but remember that your purpose will be uniquely yours. You don't need to change the world on a global scale to live meaningfully.

The Path Forward: Integrating Purpose into Daily Life

Finding your purpose isn't a one-time revelation—it's an ongoing process of alignment between your values, strengths, and contribution to the world. Start small. You don't need to quit your job or make dramatic life changes immediately. Instead, look for ways to infuse more meaning into your current circumstances.

Perhaps it's mentoring a colleague, volunteering a few hours monthly, or using your skills to support a cause you believe in. Purpose often begins as a side stream that gradually becomes a river.

Reclaiming Meaning in the Modern Age

The antidote to modern purposelessness isn't returning to the past, but rather consciously creating the conditions for meaning in our current context. This means:

• Choosing depth over breadth in our commitments and relationships
• Connecting with others who share our values and concerns
• Balancing individual fulfillment with contribution to something larger than ourselves
• Embracing the journey rather than expecting a single, permanent answer

Conclusion: Your Unique Thread in the Human Tapestry

The search for purpose is both deeply personal and fundamentally universal. While the external landscape has changed dramatically since ancient times, the human need for meaning remains constant. The difference today is that we have both the freedom and the responsibility to consciously craft our own sense of purpose.

Your purpose doesn't need to be grandiose or world-changing in an obvious way. It simply needs to be authentic to who you are and directed toward something beyond yourself. In a world that often feels fragmented and fast-paced, choosing to live purposefully is itself a radical act—one that benefits not only you but everyone whose life you touch.

The thread of your unique purpose, woven consciously into the larger tapestry of human experience, adds beauty, strength, and meaning to the whole. The question isn't whether you have a purpose—it's whether you'll take the time to discover and honor it.

What step will you take today to move closer to a life of deeper meaning and purpose?

The House of Forgotten Names ( A haunted tale by s.shah)

                          

Chapter 1: The Commission

The letter arrived during the monsoon of 1900, sealed with crimson wax that bore the impression of a crescent moon. Inside, elegant Urdu script promised payment in gold mohurs beyond my wildest dreams for a single task: map the interior of Haveli Siyah before its abandonment to the British colonial authorities. The signature belonged to someone claiming to be Nawab Mirza Shahryar's heir—impossible, since the nobleman had no family and vanished during the Rebellion of 1857.

I should have questioned it. Should have wondered why a condemned haveli needed mapping, or why the payment was enough to buy a small estate in Lahore. Instead, I packed my instruments and headed for the village of Kala Pahar, driven by greed and the promise of cartographic glory.

The village greeted me with silence thicker than the dust storms of summer. When I mentioned the haveli, conversations died like snuffed oil lamps. Children scattered behind their mothers' dupatta. The village elder's wife touched her taweez and whispered, "Woh wapis aa gaya hai—he has come back for another one."

"Who?" I pressed in broken Punjabi.

Her eyes went distant as evening stars. "The last naqsha-nawis. Said he'd map the cursed place too. Found pieces of his compass scattered across the fields three days later. Never found him. Allah have mercy."

Chapter 2: First Entry

Haveli Siyah crouched against the Nurri Hills like a diseased beast, its Mughal arches twisted into impossible geometries. My compass spun wildly as I approached, needle dancing as if the very earth was possessed by djinn. The great wooden doors, carved with verses from long-forgotten texts, hung open—had been open, the villagers claimed, since the night Nawab Shahryar disappeared.

Inside, the cool marble floors echoed my footsteps wrong. Each sound returned distorted, as if the haveli was mocking me with broken impressions of my movements. I began sketching the central courtyard, noting the dimensions of its surrounding rooms, when I realized something that turned my blood to ice water.

My measurements didn't add up. The interior was larger than the exterior by impossible margins—larger than the entire hilltop the haveli sat upon.

Room by room, I documented the impossibility. Corridors lined with intricate tile work that stretched farther than the building's outer walls should allow. Staircases that climbed forty steps when the haveli was only two stories high. A durbar hall whose ceiling soared into darkness that my oil lamp couldn't penetrate, adorned with mirror work that reflected things that weren't there.

By evening prayer time, my map had become a fevered nightmare—lines that crossed through solid walls, chambers that existed in the same space, and architecture that defied God's natural laws.

Chapter 3: The Other Cartographer

In what should have been the library, its shelves lined with mouldering volumes of Persian poetry and astronomical treatises, I found the first body.

He sat hunched over a low desk, qalam still clutched in skeletal fingers stained with henna, his map spread before him like a prayer mat. The man wore the silk robes of a Mughal court official, his brass nameplate reading "Ustad Mirza Daniyal, Royal Cartographer to His Majesty." Impossible—the Mughal Empire had fallen decades ago, yet this man looked as if he'd been working since the time of Akbar.

His map was identical to mine. Every impossible room, every twisted corridor, drawn in the exact same hand—my hand. At the bottom, in my own careful nastaliq script, were the words: "Day 847: Allah forgive me, I understand now. We never leave. We just... continue the work."

I stumbled backwards, my map crumpling like dead leaves, when I heard it—the scratch of a qalam on parchment, coming from the desk. Daniyal's corpse was moving, adding new lines to his map, sketching rooms I hadn't discovered yet, rooms that were materialising even as he drew them.

His skull turned toward me with the sound of grinding bone. Empty sockets regarded me with impossible awareness, and when he spoke, his voice was the whisper of sand through hourglasses.

"Welcome back, my brother," he said through teeth like broken pearls. "How many incarnations is this now? I've lost count since the British came."

Chapter 4: The Gallery of Selves

I fled through corridors decorated with frescoes that moved when I wasn't looking directly at them, but the haveli had different plans. Every carved archway I passed through led to the same room—a portrait gallery lined with miniature paintings of cartographers. Dozens of them, spanning centuries, all holding maps of Haveli Siyah. All wearing my face beneath different turbans and caps.

In the center hung the largest portrait: Nawab Mirza Shahryar himself, painted in the classical Mughal style, but with my eyes, my nose, my mouth. The gold nameplate beneath read simply, "Al-Awwal—The First."

A voice behind me spoke my thoughts in perfect Urdu: "Pareshan mat ho, —don't be troubled. You are exactly where your soul belongs."

I turned to find myself facing... myself. Another me, wearing the cream-colored sherwani I remembered putting on this morning, though I couldn't recall doing so. This other me smiled with lips that moved wrong, as if someone was learning to operate my face through memory alone.

"I came last month," he said casually, adjusting his matching pagri. "Or was it during the reign of Bahadur Shah? Time flows like the Ravi here, sometimes forward, sometimes back. You're the one from next week, I think. Or perhaps you're from 1757, mapping the haveli for Nawab Sahib the first time."

My vision blurred like heat shimmer on the Grand Trunk Road. "This isn't possible."

"Isn't it? Check your equipment bag."

With trembling hands, I opened my leather satchel. Inside were dozens of identical maps, all in my precise nastaliq script, all documenting the same impossible rooms. Some were yellowed with the patina of centuries, others looked freshly drawn with ink still wet. One was dated 1757 in the Hijri calendar. Another bore the mark of 1857. The newest carried tomorrow's date in both Islamic and Christian reckonings.

"we are all the same person," the other me continued, his voice carrying the weight of centuries. "Nawab Mirza Shahryar, master of maps and measurements, drawn back to his haveli again and again, trapped in a cycle of his own architectural obsession. Every time we think we're someone new—a different name, different memories, a different village of birth—but the haveli knows the truth of our soul."

Chapter 5: The Revelation

The memories crashed back like the flooding Indus, washing away the lie of my current identity. I remembered commissioning this haveli, designing its impossible architecture as an experiment in sacred geometry, trying to build a physical representation of the mystical concepts I'd studied in the books of Sufi masters. I remembered the first time I got lost in my own creation, how panic had driven me deeper into passages that defied the laws of mathematics and nature.

I remembered dying here, alone and mad, in 1757, the year the British began their conquest of our lands.

I remembered being reborn as a revenue surveyor in 1763, drawn back to map my own tomb. As a military engineer in 1803, commissioned by the Company to study the haveli's strategic value. As an archaeologist in 1857, seeking the lost Nawab Shahryar during the great uprising, seeking myself.

Every identity was a lie the haveli told me, a new mask worn by the same trapped soul. The villagers' warnings, the elder's fear—they'd witnessed this cycle play out dozens of times across generations: different faces, different names, same doomed man returning to his architectural prison.

"but this time will be different," I whispered, the words feeling rehearsed like a well-practised ghazal. "This time I'll break free."

My doppelganger laughed—a sound like shattering bangles. "That's what we always say. That's what keeps the game interesting for centuries."

 

Chapter 6: The House Reveals Its Purpose

The haveli began to shift around us, marble walls folding like the pages of an illuminated manuscript, revealing its true nature. We weren't trapped in a building—we were imprisoned inside a living map, a dimensional diagram I'd drawn with my own blood and mathematical madness, inspired by the geometric patterns of Islamic art taken to their impossible extreme.

"You wanted to map the impossible," my other self said as reality warped like a reflection in disturbed water. "So the haveli made itself your eternal project. Every time you think you've finished, it creates new rooms based on new geometric principles and architectural impossibilities. You feed it with your obsession, and it feeds you new mysteries to solve. A perfect fusion of science and djinn magic."

Through the translucent walls, I could see other versions of myself—dozens of them, all mapping different sections of the infinite haveli. Some had been working for centuries, their maps sprawling across entire rooms like vast Persian carpets made of ink and parchment. Others had just begun, their faces still bright with the hope of discovery and the promise of British gold.

"The commission letters," I gasped, understanding flooding through me like the call to prayer at dawn. "I send them to myself."

"every single time. Can't resist a good mystery, can we? The heir who doesn't exist, the impossible payment, the haveli that needs mapping before the British seize it." He grinned with my face, adjusting his pagri. "We write them when we're lucid between incarnations, hide them in the past for our future selves to find. The perfect bait for the perfect trap. Even we can't resist the promise of mapping the unmappable."

 

Chapter 7: The Choice

"so what happens now?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.

"Now you choose. Accept the truth and join us willingly, continuing to map forever with full knowledge of what you are—a soul bound by your own genius and ambition. Or..." He gestured to the walls, where I could see other versions of myself working frantically, their eyes mad with geometric fervour, some speaking in tongues, others weeping over calculations that couldn't be solved. "Fight it. Convince yourself you can escape, that this incarnation is different. Drive yourself insane trying to solve the unsolvable, to map the infinite."

I looked at my hands, already stained with ink that hadn't been there moments before, patterns appearing on my palms that matched the geometric designs on the walls. My map was updating itself, adding new rooms I hadn't discovered, sketching passages that hadn't existed until I observed them into being.

"There is a third option," I said slowly in Arabic.

"Oh? What wisdom do you offer?"

I began tearing up the map, ripping it into smaller and smaller pieces. With each destroyed section, the haveli shuddered. Marble cracked. The infinite corridors started to collapse like a house of cards in the monsoon wind.

"If I am the haveli, and the haveli is my map, then destroying the map should”

"Should kill us all, yes," my double finished in Persian, the language of poetry and sorrow. "Every version of ourselves, trapped here since before the British came. Is that really what your soul desires? To end all our incarnations?"

I looked around at my other selves, bent over their endless work, mapping rooms that spawned new rooms, solving geometric puzzles that generated new mysteries. Was this existence of eternal creation truly worse than the void?

The torn map pieces scattered to the marble floor like fallen petals, and with them, pieces of the haveli began to vanish. Windows sealed themselves. Archways collapsed. The impossible Mughal architecture was collapsing into mundane, British-approved reality.

 

Epilogue: The Final Twist

I woke up in Kala Pahar's only inn, the morning sun streaming through simple wooden shutters. The innkeeper's wife was gently shaking me awake, her dupatta covering her greying hair.

"Bad dreams, son?" she asked kindly in Punjabi.

I sat up, my head pounding like a drum. On the wooden table beside my charpoy was a commission letter, sealed in crimson wax. With trembling fingers, I opened it, already knowing what I would find.

"Map the interior of Haveli Siyah before its transfer to British authorities. Payment: 100 gold mohurs."

The signature belonged to Mirza Shahryar.

Outside my window, the haveli stood intact against the morning hills, its impossible architecture piercing the clouds like minarets of madness. In my hands, the letter crumbled to ash, and new words appeared on the blank paper in elegant nastaliq:

"Welcome back. Ready to begin again?"

I reached for my equipment bag, knowing with sick certainty that I would find my maps inside—dozens of them, all identical, all waiting to be drawn again. The cycle wasn't broken. It had simply reset itself like the seasons, like the monsoons, like the endless conquests of our land.

As I packed my instruments, I caught my reflection in the small mirror by the washbasin. For just a moment, my eyes weren't my own. They belonged to Nawab Mirza Shahryar, the first cartographer, the one who built this prison of maps and mathematics and mystical obsession.

I smiled with his lips and headed for the door, already composing in my mind the commission letter I would hide for my next incarnation to find, already calculating the gold that would tempt my future self.

After all, every good map needs a legend written in the margins. And every legend needs someone foolish enough to believe it's just a story told by villagers in the shadow of cursed architecture.

The haveli always wins. Allah knows best.

THE END