There is such great good fortune in being able to pursue one’s highest aspiration. Mine has been for God and the spiritual side of life. For 49 of my 55 years it has been the most compelling aspect of my life.

Except for rare occasions, I’ve had a sense of God’s presence since I was 6-years old. This isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. Among people who make God, religion, and/or spirituality their life’s work, enough have written about their first mystical experience occurring at six or seven that I’ve decided there’s something in the maturation process of the human brain that makes this experience available then. As I came into my late teens, moving toward young adulthood, I assumed I needed to take this experience of the presence of God and my keen interest in spirituality and turn it into a career. That didn’t work out – not in my twenties when the desire felt like a calling and not in my forties when I revisited the notion.

Old enough to have fewer years ahead of me than I have behind me, I’ve wondered what it’s been about, this aspiration to love God with all my heart, soul, and mind – to have the luck and gift of that relationship. Wasn’t I meant to do something big and grand with it?!

Mulling it over once again, today I consider the possibility that one’s highest aspiration doesn’t have to be turned into a career. Instead, it can be what tucks you in at night, what casts your dreams, what greets you at the start of the day and carries you through each week.

It can play a part in making you a mensch – supporting you to be the kind of person who is available to help others in times of crisis or the smallest need.

A highest aspiration doesn’t have to be a self-defining thing. It doesn’t have to have goals or boundaries, expectations or agendas, a to-do list or a white board. Rather, it can be a place where essence is illuminated and where terms like success and failure are not a topic of thought or conversation. Instead of being turned into a measuring stick, it can be an expression of one’s essence, one’s heart, one’s being.

When I pull the “I should’ve done something grand with it” out of there and consider the words written above, it feels like a free gift I can freely receive, trusting that being receptive to it is enough. And that I am…enough.