Not Everyone Has A Mission

Karina Pawlak
7 min readJan 31, 2024
Mission Resonance. 2023. Avatar created from Karina’s self portrait using Lensa

Ever since I was a child I felt a sense of mission. I felt in my soul there is something I need to do. And, not just anything. Something beyond the expected responsibility of getting an education, a job, and bearing children. This feeling drives me. But sometimes it feels heavy.

I have argued with this feeling and accused it of being wrong. I argued that I don’t need to strive so hard at all. But then I felt the ungenuiness of that argument. You cannot argue with a feeling resonating through your whole being. Deep down I feel like I have a mission predestined from times immemorial and I cannot rest until it is over. Sometimes I even think that if I don’t get it done in this life, I am going to have to come back and get it done in the next life. Absurd? Maybe. Have I considered it a delusion? Yes I have. The feeling persists.

I get a reprieve from this feeling during fevers. Fevers temporarily unburden the heaviness. I even started to research fevers. Some research suggests that letting fevers run instead of quashing them with Tylenol may have cancer killing effects. The entire fever immune response is fascinating.

But what about meditation?

Meditation has not rid me of my feeling of mission but in fact amplified it.

Does that mean that it has increased the heaviness? No.

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