I had a nice conversation yesterday on the challenge of finding purpose within, in a world which has lost many of the traditional places or containers which used to supply meaning in the past. It is a challenge all through life, and it comes down to having some degree of comfort in our sense of who we are and where we are at this moment. In other words, as Winnicott says, “we gather the personality together from within” by developing a capacity to be at ease with an interior “formlessness and comfortable solitude”, without being afraid, or needing to fill the space with objects and distractions. In this way we unlearn a lot of the messages which come from our restless society or from the wounds of our own history:
To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core. Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.
Mark Nepo,
“Happiness,” Helen Keller wrote, “is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” In a society bent on individualism, the insight bends the mind a bit. But think a minute. To realize what great stream of life flows in us, to discover who and what we are and then to give ourselves over to the energy and drive of it for the sake of the world at large has got to be the greatest personal insight in life. 
There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean that we do it well. The second task is encountered more than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose or passion. We are a”first-half-of-life-culture”, largely concerned with surviving successfully. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands to us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, a family, community, security and building a proper platform for our only life. But it takes us much longer to discover “the task within the task” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing. 
The human person is a threshold where many infinities meet. There is the infinity of space that reaches out into the depths of the cosmos; the infinity of time reaching back over billions of years. …. A world lies hidden behind each human face. In some faces the vulnerability of inner exposure to these depths becomes visible. When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. this moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze becomes the vehicle of some primal inner presence. This gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim something more than the person looks out. Another infinity as yet unborn, is dimly present. you feel that you are being looked at from the strangeness of the eternal. The infinity gazing out at you is from an ancient time. We cannot seal off the eternal. Unexpectedly and disturbingly, it gazes in at us through the sudden apertures in our patterned lives. A friend, who loves lace, often says that it is the holes in lace that render it beautiful. Our experience has this lace structure…..
