On Purpose

How meaning became a mandate

My husband and I are both at crossroads in our careers. Those early survival days of toddler-and-babyhood are finally receding; we’re sleeping through the night (him—definitely; me and my catastrophising brain—sometimes), and we suddenly have a little more space to ponder that age-old question: what the F*ck am I doing with my life?

Sigh.

It is an important question. I’m tired of toiling to pay bills with work that sometimes feels like it’s cheese-grating my soul while the stuff I actually care about gets squeezed in around the edges. Tired of loitering in the sidelines of my ‘shadow career’ of copywriting, while the future Actual Writer Me shimmers like an infuriating mirage. Late at night I think: I’m not aligning my life with my PURPOSE. And I must live out my purpose, goddammit.

Meanwhile, my husband is newly redundant (a blessing not-even-in-disguise) and desperate to find what his purpose IS. He has passions, curiosities, talents, interests… and yet none of it appeases his belief that somewhere out there is a single shining north-star-noun he is meant to grab and follow for the rest of his life. When I tell him his purpose might simply be being the greatest human on the planet, he raises his eyebrow. (I still think he is.) The irony: I’m exhausted by the pressure to find my purpose while he feels lost without one. He wants purpose to be a noun — a thing he can name — and I seem to experience it as a verb, something I can DO my way into.

It seems our generation has turned purpose into a moral obligation. As if not knowing your calling is a personal failing instead of a sign that your life is safe enough to even ask the question in the first place. And what if our purpose here on this (completely bonkers) planet didn’t always relate to what we do? It’s a much-used adage at this point, but still: we are human beings, not human doings.

And purpose shifts with life stage. For the past six years, my purpose has mostly been keeping small humans alive and thriving. Before that, I was looking for someone to spend my life with (how very unfeminist of me, but I was). Before that I was recovering (very unhealthily) from a divorce. Before that I thought my purpose was to save the world one complicated sustainability strategy at a time.

Through all this, I’ve still been a person, and maybe it’s enough that my purpose has been surviving, moving, flexing — finding the next point on the map I needed to reach. So maybe purpose isn’t a single lifelong north star but a series of waypoints lighting the path as we go (a path I couldn’t have conjured in my wildest dreams anyway). There’s a quote I tend to revert to when I feel unsure about the way forward, by the poet Antonio Machado, which is ‘we make the path by walking the path.’ In other words, just keep moving and all will (eventually) be revealed.

The fact that I even have the luxury to get my knickers in a twist about purpose is proof that so many of my deepest prayers have already been answered. If I’m dwelling on existential questions, it means the basics are going pretty damn well. Speaking to the points above - I never thought I’d recover from divorce in my early thirties, never thought I’d meet anyone to love, thought I’d left it too late and fudged up too much to have babies. But those fundamental building blocks were slowly and carefully put in place. So now, yes — I have the space to wrangle with meaning late at night. And I have to remind myself, that if I have room for this question, something has gone, and is going, right.

I’m not saying seeking purpose isn’t important — it is, and I know it’s a question I’ll carry for life. But our grandparents didn’t layer all of this onto their lives. Nor, really, did our parents. Raising kids, having a job, taking a two-week summer holiday — that was enough. When did it all get so complicated? I think it got complicated because we got lucky: we inherited a world with more safety, more freedom, and, as a result, far more ways to feel like we’re getting it wrong.

And mothers get the bonus round - being told that raising children should either be their whole purpose or just one of many flawlessly juggled purposes. We’re meant to be tender mothers, loving partners, fun friends, present daughters, financially secure, socially fulfilled, spiritually enriched, well-exercised, with a gua-sha glow and time to volunteer at our children’s schools….who ALSO have full-time careers that bring us some sense of a life purpose.

What I guess I’m offering here - as someone who has pondered on purpose for many-a-year - is a series of maybes. Starting with: maybe we can take the pressure off ourselves a bit. As an ‘older’ millennial, I think we’ve spent so long navel-gazing that we forget a fundamental truth: part of the purpose of life is simply to enjoy it. To notice trees and sunsets and our babies’ hands in ours. To delight in pizza, sea-swimming, belly-laughs. To dance because your body won’t let you not. To sing, be silly, kiss, hug, tell your people you love them. That’s a pretty frickin’ decent purpose. So then maybe the careers, the callings, the life’s work — maybe that’s the side-stuff, not the main event. And maybe if we make it our purpose to enjoy, to notice, to be unadulteratedly unapologetic about who we are, meaning begins to fall into place on its own? Maybe purpose isn’t something we choose. Maybe it was always meant to be the map we wander by, not the mandate we strong-arm ourselves into submission with.

And so, I tell my husband, when we’ve gone to bed too late again: if we’re having this conversation, maybe it means we’re lucky. It means our daughter’s illness is in remission for now. It means we found each other, and were lucky enough to have two amazing kids. It means we have an apartment, family, friends, food. And with everything else hurtling around the world right now, maybe the invitation is simply this:

Let your purpose be to enjoy it, just for a little while.

💙