The following quote deals with the difficulty we all have in finding the place in life where we have purpose, happiness, and a sense of spiritual understanding. We often get bogged down in life, we lose our way, and life can become tedious, boring, without challenge or direction and we feel unfulfilled. We look for help, but help never seems to come. We fail to find the "Ideal World": so, where do we start?

  "Can we not say that the hour of our spiritual liberation is even this: when your "Ideal World," wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly failing in strength to find this Ideal World, finally becomes revealed, and thrown wide open; and you discover with amazement enough, that your "America is here or nowhere"?

Now the circumstance or situation, that has no duty, that has no Ideal, has never yet been occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable ACTUAL, where you even now stand, here or nowhere is your "Ideal": work it out from here; and working, believe, live, be free.

Don't be a fool, the Ideal is in yourself, but the obstacle is as well: your condition is the very stuff that you are to shape that same Ideal out of: what does it matter whether that stuff is of this sort or that, so long as the form you give it be heroic.

O you that pine away in the imprisonment of the Actual, and cry bitterly to the gods for an ideal kingdom where you can rule and create, know this, for this is the truth: the thing you seek is already with you, "here or nowhere," if you could only see!" Thomas Carlyle.

  I believe his conclusion that God will not whisk you away, by some glad circumstance or person, and drop you in an ideal kingdom where all of our talents and desires are fulfilled, but rather, each of us, right where we are, must use the opportunities at hand to build that place of satisfaction. Not apart from God, no, rather with the help of God: He alone will answer and strengthen you for the task.