A Purpose Driven Life

Life seems random and meaningless at times and the horror of it sometimes is overwhelming.  But it is during these tough times, the answer to coping is often found in the experience itself. 
Victor Frankl, a brilliant Viennese neurologist, was nearly killed in the Nazi concentration camps. His whole family, including his wife, were rounded up and put to work in the camps. Eventually the only surviving member of his family, besides Victor, was his sister. During the bleakest time of his experience in the camps, Frankl writes:

...A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

Victor went on to found a branch of humanistic psychology known as "logotherapy".

...Rather than power or pleasure, logotherapy is founded upon the belief that it is the striving to find a meaning in one's life that is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force in humans....^[4]

Frankl learned from that horrid experience in the brutal Nazi concentration camps, that those that were able to better mentally cope with their camp experience had a sense of purpose for their lives.
Nobody can tell us what our purpose in life is. We have to work that out for ourselves. But usually we find our purpose in life by examining what truly makes us feel alive and what animates us. It also helps to be mindful of our life experiences so we can learn what opportunities exist that we might be ignoring.
Ultimately, our purpose may be as simple and as powerful as being a source of love and compassion in the world, as Frankl himself had experienced in his darkest hours.