What is your mission and do you choose to accept it?

What is the meaning of life? Why were we put on this earth? These are very big questions which no one can provide the answer too.  It is a question that I am sure all of us wonder at some point in our life.  I find myself often wondering about what I am supposed to accomplish in my life. Some look towards faith to answer this question, while others look at a measure of success they must obtain.  Everybody feels differently on this topic, which is why it is such a controversial question.  I feel that we must get through our life assignments to find out who we are as an individual and where we stand in our society.  This can be anywhere from graduating high school or college, moving our of your parent’s house, or small tasks that help you become an independent that are going to define who you are.  Could this be the meaning? Who knows.

Bharati Mukherjee brings this topic up in her engrossing novel “Jasmine”. It is always interesting to hear someone else’s view and thoughts about similar topics.  In short, this novel is about a main character named Jasmine who is suddenly widowed at seventeen,\ and seems to be fated to a quiet life of isolation in the small Indian village where she was born.  But her desires takes her to a more dangerous and life-giving world.  She obtains a new identity, Jane, who is happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker.  She goes through a metamorphosis which takes her into the making of an American mind. This sets the background of the life assignments Mukherjee elaborates about through her characters confusion on this topic.

Pg. 59 of the novel provides some good views in this area. It is as follows:

“Grant the notion that there’s a God.  For the sake of argument, then, if He’s God, His assignments are perhaps too vast for the human mind, even your very superior one, Taylor.…… Perhaps Pitaji’s life assignment was merely to crunch one small piece of gravel as he jumped our of the bus that mourning, and once he did, perhaps God took the form of a maddened bull, or God took the form of nettles that caused a perfectly harmless bull enough pain to charge.  Perhaps my father’s assignment was to be just that; to die a freakish accident before he could marry me off so that I could be free to fall in love with Prakash.”

Looking at this short quote, it provides some very good views of Mukherjee and her character in this novel.  First, as you can see, she says god is governing our life plan and our destiny.  Second, it was her father’s assignment or destiny to suffer this freakish death so that she would not be married off and break out of her controlled quiet life. So is our life is planned out and each of us has an assignment in which we must carry out is what I believe Mukherjee is portraying in this scene.

Are all these life assignments always a clear cut event? Or are they sometimes small and futile?  Mukherjee approaches this question in the next following paragraphs:

“Maybe Pitaji’s assignment was merely to flee Lahore and provide a comfortable house for some Muslim gentlemen and gold for someone’s former servant. Maybe Pitaji’s mission was to pluck a certain flower and release a certain seed. The scale of Brahma is vast, as vast as space in the universe. Why shouldn’t our mission be infinitesimal? Aren’t all lives, viewed that way, equally small, Only if we think of “assignment”as an important mission, something historical, was Pitaji a man unfulfilled.”

This is an interesting paragraph because it raises a question of significance to our life missions or assignments.  Jane, in the novel, is trying to determine what exactly was Pitaji’s assignment in his life.  I believe it is never clear, and nobody can really narrow down their own role in this world. I think this is the point that Mukherjee is putting across in this paragraph.  She is also questioning the significance of our life missions compared to the rest of the world.  Are each and every one of us suppose to discover a new species, create a new type of signficant invention, or cure a fatal disease? Or can it be simple daily events that go by unnoticeable? This we can not really give an answer to.

The last quote I would like to examine is one made by the character Taylor which I think brings a good perspective forward:

“I couldn’t live in a world like yours,” he said. “If rearranging a particle of dust is as important as discovering relativity, that’s the formula for total anarchy. Total futility. Total fatalism. Where’s the incentive to do anything?”

This is a good quote, I believe, because it shows that we cannot go on living on our lives worrying about our role and missions in our life.  If we go about dissecting every little action we do and try to decipher whether we have completed a life mission, it can drive a person crazy.  It can lead to a life of anarchy, as Taylor puts, if one chooses to live their life this way. Jane responds to Taylor in this manner:

“The incentive, I should have said, is to treat every second of your existence as a possible assignment from God.  Everything you do, of you’re a physicist or a caregiver, is equally important in the eye of God.”

This further reinforces the idea that not all assignments must have some technical merit or big impact in the world.

Overall, I found much insight when referring to this novel and Mukherjee’s views on this topic.  I had my own views beforehand, but it was interesting to read about it.  This topic rings throughout this novel as Jane is trying to adjust to this life-giving world and adapt from her traditional ways of life in India. I personally believe that we should just “live” and not be concerned in distinguishing important or insignificant events in our life.  I would like to recommend this novel to everybody and encourage you to look at these yourself and explore these insights as well as many others throughout the novel.