#1: This Thing Called 'Purpose'

A reflection on what it is, why we seek it, and how to find it

This newsletter features weekly musings about life, career, identity, and behaviour by a questioning African centennial. To get it in your inbox every week, subscribe here:

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This week, I've been doing a lot of thinking and planning.

I spent this first full week of 2021 wrapping up my planning for the year: goals, resolutions, and everything in between. One of my goals was to do 365 days of journaling. Sadly, I've already missed one day; and we haven't even gone halfway through January 😒

Looking through my journal entries this week though, the questions around different dimensions of purpose are the most dominant.

As I worked on creating some sort of ‘purpose’ for 2021, I naturally found myself taking a step back to reflect on the concept of purpose from a much broader perspective.

• Why do I seek my purpose?

• How do I find my purpose?

• What if I can't find my purpose?

• What if I don't have a purpose?

• Is a purposeless life a meaningless one?

These were some of the questions that were on my mind this week.

By reflecting on them, I've been able to find some clarity. Not perfect clarity, but just enough.

I'll go through each question and share my current thoughts based on the answers I arrived at while journalling this week.

Why do I seek my purpose?

The quest for my purpose is, in reality, an endeavour to bring order out of chaos. It's an effort to create a method to the madness that is life.

Life is messy, unpredictable, and brief. Living it a day at a time without any purpose or intention makes it feel like an incessant stream of sunrises and sunsets.

But when I feel like I have a purpose, I feel a lot less like a tiny cog in an eternal machine.

I imagine that having a purpose will give me a sense of direction on the foggy highway of life. It will keep me sane by allowing me to see my life as having some sort of guidance, order, and meaning. That is why I seek my purpose. I reckon it must be the same for you too.

How do I find my purpose?

For you to find something, you have to believe that it exists.

Consequently, the first step towards finding your purpose is believing that your life actually has a purpose. The second step is knowing what that purpose actually is.

For this step, there are two paths to follow: (1) going out to find your purpose, or (2) letting your purpose find you.

Choosing to find your purpose requires you to live a life of constant introspection. You'll have to regularly examine how your background, experiences, interests, frustrations, and personalities align with a particular career, cause, or community.

Not many people can do that. It's a lot of work for something you're not even sure you'll find in the end. It's therefore no surprise that most people choose the second option.

Choosing to let your purpose find you liberates you from a lot of needless pressure. It allows you to go about your day without having to think about how it fits into some larger purpose that you have no clue about. It opens you up to experiencing life as an adventure while trusting yourself enough to discover your purpose as you go through life one step at a time.

I don't think there's a right or wrong path. In my own case, I'm in a fuzzy in-between. I don't think I've found my purpose yet, but I'm taking steps to.

By journaling regularly, I'm constantly taking stock of my experiences and reflecting on them while drawing insights and lessons that I can use to improve my life. By doing that, I'm hoping to eventually figure out what my purpose is.

In the same vein, I'm also keeping myself in check to make sure I don't put too much pressure on myself in my pursuit of this nebulous 'purpose'. I'm keeping an open mind and letting life happen to me, just as much as I'm being intentional with every single day.

I told you it was fuzzy.

What if I can't find my purpose?

'Purpose' is not all that there is to living a full life. There are also things such as love and impact that are just as important, if not more so.

One of the underlying forces that drive this quest for our life's purpose is our thirst for fulfilment. We want to ensure that we can look back at our lives and be happy that we lived well.

But we don't need a purpose to live well. Instead, we need a life that's filled with love:

• love for ourselves,

• love for others, and

• love for what we do.

Such a life inevitably impacts the lives of others, directly or indirectly. It's difficult to find such a life that, in the end, was without purpose.

What if I don't have a purpose?

I think of purpose in the same way that I think about DNA. It's there even if we don't know it, can't see it, or can't understand it. It's still there.

Some people go the extra mile to learn about various components of their DNA for different reasons. But most of us don't, so we'll never know what information is encoded into our DNA. But it's all still there.

The same thing goes for purpose. No matter what we think about it, it's still there; manifesting and evolving. If we think our lives don't have a purpose, it's more likely that we just haven't found it yet. And that's okay.

We can either actively seek it or we can shift our focus to other important areas of life: love and impact.

Is a purposeless life a meaningless one?

No. Of course not. By now, you should know why I think that. 😊

Final Thoughts

If you want to explore this topic further, watch Pixar's movie Soul on Disney+ or wherever else you can find it. It's an animated movie that thoroughly dissects the meaning of life.

It ends with very powerful reflections on the banality of the human obsession with 'finding your passion' (purpose, or whatever you want to call it).

Soul will forever influence how I think about life and the need to live it fully by being more present, open, and appreciative.

A question I'll leave you with:

Is purpose something you find, something you live, or something you create?