What was I given to do - & did I do it?

This title came to me as I walking my dogs recently. Am I in tune with the profound purposes for which I was given life? Am I clear what they are? To what extent am I accomplishing what it's my role to achieve?
In the daily plod it's hard to be sure whether the steps we take are carrying us towards our goal or away? For the path often twists and when we find ourselves not obviously proceeding in the direction we think we should be, it takes a lot of faith to maintain belief that it is our correct route – but OTOH if we're already lost, maybe better to backtrack immediately ...?
Here's what I think. The key lies in keeping your inner motivation to serve the light within you high and strong. If your heart burns with that love, then the light shines, and provided you ensure the link of faith keeps your inner & outer world real and grounded, you are on the right road, because that is itself the right road, and because it is what all the goals & vicissitudes are designed to teach.
That's where trust comes in. To know intellectually where you should be heading, or to have a plan, is the surest possible way to lose the way &/or the plot. It's that trust between your self and your 'inner otherness' that is itself the 'intunity' which we all seek throu external means. And yet the way to find it was always within, smaller than the eye of the needle, a whole world made small. The very greatest gift of all.
Sometimes we have to accept that we're simply called to walk in the dark, at such times the bible verse 'whatever thy hand findeth to do: do it with all thy might,' is appropriate. This concept is well rendered by John Updike in his poem Midpoint
"Cherish your work, take pleasure in your task,
For doing's the one reward a man dare ask."

Centring

Each morning I have to recalibrate my senses and reset my emotional baseline to neutral, that is to some sense of contact with an ultimate reality which allows me to connect with /surrender to it – or else my monkey mind goes busily about its whirling way, progressively confabulating probabilities into a spiral of planning & projections. (This is of course useful in its place.)
It isn't always possible to centre, for a variety of reasons: I may be excited about busyness that lies ahead, I may have had dreams that I have been unable to process – or indeed may not be consciously aware of, yet which are strongly colouring my subconscious mindset – I may have heavy food or alcohol in my digestive system that is governing my mental process and preventing me achieving clarity.
I refer to these circ~s as spiritual weather: sometimes it's sunny: sometimes it's overcast: sometimes it's stormy. During the latter I repeat my mantra: 'Sai Ram', invoking Sai Baba, the figure from whom I have drawn most spiritual empowerment. (I do not see him as an individual, who is separate from or in opposition to other spiritual teachers – but rather as someone whose energies are most present for me, and who thus becomes a lens throu whom I see to the depths of truth at which all traditions converge.) I also find invoking him really works when I am sleepless – it's a great use of what o/wise is 'dead' time.
The joke about meditation that 'the first 20 years are the worst' is absolutely correct – but the real benefit of persisting is that you come to experience your inner world in all sorts of different circ~s, and thus are able to form an overview of the dimensions of that world. Over such a length of time you are pretty certain to have visited some of the more extreme corners of your psyche and meditation gives you a tool with which to observe yourself as you go throu different kinds of 'weather'.
The day on which I wrote this was one on which I found myself led to put forward a contentious proposal within a group – and that too provided fascinating opportunities for self-observation.