Discovering & Proclaiming Your Own Trumania

There’s an awesome scene from The Truman Show that’s a great metaphor for the moment of realization of your life’s passion and purpose. It’s the point in the movie when Truman fully understands who he is within the context of the “world” around him and what he needs to do to be truly happy (unbeknownst…

There’s an awesome scene from The Truman Show that’s a great metaphor for the moment of realization of your life’s passion and purpose. It’s the point in the movie when Truman fully understands who he is within the context of the “world” around him and what he needs to do to be truly happy (unbeknownst to his viewers). Even more poignant is his playful gesture of proclaiming “Trumania”, as though he had just discovered a new world of his own.

What I find interesting about this is how searching for your passion and purpose in life is exactly like searching for a new world. It’s not a single act (i.e. landing on a beach of a new continent) but instead a series of actions that fully map out and define the perimeter or parameters of it (i.e. numerous landings on the coast, numerous ventures up coastal rivers to map the interior of it) until you achieve a moment of realization at seeing the world in full. Yet this world you’re mapping and surveying doesn’t exist on any geographical map but instead exists within yourself, defining your existing world view of who you are within the context of the world around you and what you believe you can do within it.

I can’t tell you how many times I felt like my life was like being adrift on a river and not knowing where I was or where I was going. Even more so, when I looked back at where I had been, at places I had stopped alongside the river, they just seemed like random destinations with no sense of location, purpose, or meaning. I kept wanting to be able to fly high above where I was, so I could see things from a different perspective and get my bearings but I was never able to do this. Now I realize I didn’t need to do so. My journey itself was helping me to discover where I was and where I was going. I just needed the awareness and perspective to understand what I was looking at collectively.

You see the awareness and understanding doesn’t come from just looking at the individual waypoints of your life. It comes from looking at them as a whole and seeing how they relate and interact with one another collectively, no matter how remote and distant they may seem to be. Only then will all of the pieces connect and you’ll finally see the new world you’ve passionately known was there all along.