There’s something about the holidays that brings me to a point of evaluation–and sometimes exhaustion–every year. When I start reaching the end of the year, I start evaluating what I’ve done, going over the good and the bad of what went before and thinking about what is coming in the future. That’s the finite nature of we humans. There is a beginning and an ending for everything.

With these stops and starts and points of reflection, we often stand on a symbolic hillside looking over the contents of our lives and wonder about the meaning and the reasons. The reality is that we all have a beginning and an ending and we often think about them regularly, but we often forget the things that come in the middle. We tend to take that part for granted.

It’s here in the middle of our lives that the action takes place. What’s happening in the here and now is what we often have the most difficult time reflecting upon. Maybe we are just too busy, too involved, or too preoccupied to pay closer attention to what is presently happening. I think that DE offers a here and now approach to relationship that we should all pay attention to.

A couple of days after Christmas, I was standing in a large electronics store looking for the perfect deal on a laptop for my nephew. I was preoccupied with what was going on with me and my own goal to help him when I was suddenly confronted with that feeling that I have had many, many times. “Why am I here?” I can’t count the number of times that this thought has surfaced from my consciousness at the strangest of moments. Happy hours, shopping frenzies, sporting events, anytime that I am there among throngs of other souls, I suddenly feel the question sneaking up on me. “Why am I here? Oh, and by the way, why is everyone here?”

I won’t try to oversimplify any answers to that grand question, but I will say that a shopping frenzy can really bring out my worry for the state of mankind (note sarcasm there). Even so, it is usually at this time that I start noticing others in a surreal kind of way as if I am a fly on the wall and they don’t know that I am observing them–and they usually don’t.

I was thinking that same thing years ago at a dive bar after a coworker dragged me there. She had a bit of a drinking problem and I was too nice to say “No.” Later in the evening, I found myself sitting at the bar while she canoodled with someone on the other side of the room. That was when I noticed the uniform of a man sitting a couple of seats over at the bar. He had a uniform that matched the one my father wore everyday and that meant that he worked with my father, but I pretended not to know that and instead asked him a benign question. That question lead to the state of the union address on this man’s life and it was a doozy. So, there I sat drinking my regular Diet Coke, and listening and at times counseling this man in a place that I never would’ve gone to under my own volition and I realized that I had a purpose no matter where I wandered or how I came to be there.

I can’t remember the particulars of that conversation all these years later, but I remember he thanked me for the conversation. I do remember talking to him about purpose, but I realize now that there was purpose in it for both of us.

We can choose to focus on our beginnings or on our endings, but it’s the middle part where our purpose exists. The answer to the question, “Why am I here?” lies in the monotony of our everyday interaction with one another.