You sound like a genuinely interesting guy and, quite possibly, a writer in the making :) Re: purpose & higher calling, "taking things one day and one step at a time" is a sound approach. I think of these wise words by a poet that I deeply admire, Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Peace,
Yahia