Purpose · fiction
What is the purpose of my life?
An epic story that follows a hydrogen atom from the beginning of the universe to the body of a young man in 2070, who asks what he was born for.
A vision — a short story.
In the beginning, before any question, there was hydrogen.
Three hundred and eighty thousand years after the great flash, the universe cooled enough for a proton and an electron to embrace. So the simplest atom there is was born. It didn't know it was simple. It knew nothing. It simply was. And, now and then, it changed state and released a whisper of radio at an exact frequency, one thousand four hundred and twenty megahertz, as if saying softly: I'm here.
The atom drifted for billions of years in a dark cloud. It was pulled into a star and burned. It was spat out when the star exploded. It drifted again. It fell, along with dust and ice, onto a small blue planet that had no name yet. It became rain. It became sea. It entered an alga, which was eaten by a fish, which died and became ocean floor. It rose as vapor. It came down as snow on a mountain. It came down as a river.
In 2052, it went into a glass of water that a pregnant woman drank one hot afternoon, in a town in Portugal.
And it became part of a boy.
The boy was born, grew up, and in 2070, at eighteen, sat on an old wall, facing the sea, and asked the question every human being asks at some point:
"What was I born for?"
He didn't ask anyone. He asked the sea.
His friends knew what they wanted. One would be an energy engineer. Another would work with the artificial intelligence agents that looked after the cities. Another was going to space. He didn't know. He liked many things and nothing in particular. He felt everyone had been given a map and his had been lost in the mail.
That's when, sitting on the wall, eyes on the horizon, he had a vision.
He saw the atom's whole path, in reverse. From his body to his mother's glass of water. From the glass to the river, to the snow, to the vapor, to the ocean floor, to the fish, to the alga. To the rain of the young planet. To the star that exploded. To the dark cloud. And, at the end of it all, to the first embrace between a proton and an electron, three hundred and eighty thousand years after the beginning of time.
He saw that the atom had never had a purpose. It had had a path. And that, at every point on the path, it had served something: warmed a star, quenched a fish's thirst, watered a mountain, formed a boy. It never knew what for. It did it anyway.
And he saw that the atom's whisper, the "I'm here" on the hydrogen frequency, had never stopped. That people had agreed, more than a century before, to leave that band in silence, so they could listen to it. That it was the most common sound in the universe, and the easiest to forget.
The vision ended. The sea was still there. The boy still had no map.
But the question had changed.
It was no longer "what was I born for?". It was "what can I serve today?". And that question had an answer. It had many. His grandmother needed help moving furniture. The neighbor was learning to read and was ashamed. The beach was full of plastic after the storm.
He got down from the wall and went to the beach.
He didn't discover the purpose of life that day. He discovered a task. And then another. And he realized, much later, that a purpose is only this: a line of tasks that, seen from afar, draws a path.
Bairo says there are no coincidences or accidents, only purposes, dreams and execution. He learned it as a boy, when he announced a country he didn't yet know. Read: Capoeira was the bridge.
The way forward
Perhaps the question "what was I born for?" is too big for today; swap it for "what can I serve right now?". Every task done wholeheartedly is a point on the path. Seen from afar, the path becomes purpose.