So I've been trying to read more and gleam wisdom from the world in this fashion.

Two books I've recently read share a common theme of finding your purpose.

The Alchemist is a tale of a Sheppard boy who travels the world in search of his "personal legend". Through the encounter of omens and people along his path he learns to listen to what is inside of him. Yielding to this compelling force he in turn discovers that the universe is helping him every time he chooses to walk in the direction of who he is.

In Let Your Life Speak, Parker J Palmer recounts his experience of finding his identity or "the inner light" in his quest to discover his vocation. For him he had to undo what he was taught in his Christian tradition to ultimately find himself. Here is a couple of paragraphs from early on in the book

I first learned about vocation growing up in the churh. I valued much about the religious tradition in which I was raised: its humility about its own convictions, its respect for the world's diversity, its concern for justice. But the idea of "vocation" I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet - someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.

That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of self hood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be "selfish" unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be, leaving me exhausted as I labored to close the gap.

Today I understand vocation quite differently - not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original self hood given me at birth by God.

he goes on to say

The world still waits for the truth that will set us free - my truth, your truth, our truth the truth that was seeded in the earth when each of us arrived here formed in the image of God. Cultivating that truth, I believe, is the authentic vocation of every human being.

Ultimately Palmer ended up discovering his inner light while immersed in the Quaker tradition. And in the revelation began to see how things early on pointed him there but how he strayed from who he was in search of what others had been infusing into him of who he should be.

Both of these books ring true to me in that I believe each of us are uniquely made and God yearns for us to just be authentic to who he has made us. So many people wander this world trying to achieve a vocation or identity that is someone elses and ultimately it fails them. And others long for a voice to reach out and tell them who they are. But our story starts with who God has made us and must be investigated inwardly to hear, see, understand, accept, know, and believe in. Listening to how God has made our heart break or find joy or feel passion is where we will discover our calling, walking towards them we will become authentic children.