How to Find Your Purpose

As humans we need to feel purposeful in order to feel fulfilled. But what does that really mean, “purpose”?

The word purpose comes from the Old French (by way of Latin) “purpus,” meaning “the proper function for which something exists.” Every one of us, regardless of our religious or spiritual or philosophical devotions, senses—and by that I mean FEELS—this deep, sometimes hard-to-articulate longing to exercise our “function.” We know when we’re there, as our days are suffused with a mixture of contentment and excitement. And we know when we’re not: we wake wondering, “Is this it? Is this really it?” and are haunted by that feeling that something’s missing, though we’re often not sure what it is.

To frame fulfillment in this way, as having a function—or many functions—whose execution is the purpose of our existence, is to simply remind ourselves that we are individual entities who are inextricably part of a whole. We live in an ecology. We are inter-beings with inter-experiences. We are, at the most elemental level, intra-dependent, reliant on one another and this earth for life itself.

Ecological science tells us that isolation equals death. That singularity is always, when functioning at its optimal state, in service to the collective; that we cannot thrive individually if the web of life of which were a part is sick, and the web of life of which we’re a part cannot thrive if we as the “individuals” who comprise it are not well.

To live purposefully is to inhabit unabashedly our role in the whole. And—I always find this thrilling and fascinating—to exercise our role in the whole demands of us total authenticity, that we know ourselves and embrace ourselves as the utterly unique entities we are.

In other words, to play our true role in the whole, to feel fulfilled, purposeful, we must be willing, paradoxically, to risk feeling wildly alone: we must be willing to step into vulnerability, to know and then act upon our deepest joys, which also requires accepting and working to heal our deepest wounds.

To connect and contribute meaningfully to the collective we must, counter-intuitively, stop trying to please others and instead commit to discerning and acting upon our true desires, no matter how outlandish or impractical they seem.

The more fully we accept, embrace, and act in alignment with our personal truths, the more fully and effortlessly we find ourselves living in service to a web of communion that’s bigger than we are.

We help others. We create what’s needed. We heal communities. We invent what’s missing. We teach what we agree we collectively must remember. We make and illuminate the beauty that reminds us of our commonality. This was Whitman’s imperative, his urging, when we wrote that “I celebrate myself, and sing myself. / And what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

To connect with our purposes—for I’m quite sure we each have many—is best done, then, not by searching outside, rifling through possible jobs or professions or places or vocations, but by first connecting to the experience of aliveness that unites AND distinguishes us all.

The great poet Mary Oliver called this “an attitude of noticing”: the act of simply noticing, with embodied attention (being conscious of our sensory experience) what’s around us… Where the light around us is hitting most brightly right now, what it’s illuminating… The movement, or stillness, of air as it circles and passes through us. The myriad sounds available in every moment. The rise and fall of our chests with each breath. The weight of sadness, or the open hand of appreciation in the eyes of the person ringing up our purchase.

As we shift from a habit of searching to a practice of noticing, we activate—organically, easefully—our awareness of intra-being, our oneness with all. We feel our own aliveness in others’ aliveness. We sense others’ basic emotions. We sense their suffering. We are lifted by their joy.

We have a hard time caring about that which we don’t first feel, and we have a great capacity for caring about what we do. The practice of noticing catalyzes our compassion. It moves us to mercy. The more we notice, the more we are pulled to act on behalf of what we experience as—even if in the moment we can’t name it as such—intimacy with a larger whole.

This practice of expanded encounter is what the poet Ranier Maria Rilke describes when he writes, “I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world. / I may not complete this last one / but I will give myself to it.” When we devote ourselves to noticing we become evermore aware of our own aliveness, and this recognition, in turn, ignites in us a sense of inviolable belonging. This is the inner peace of alignment, of acting in accordance with our truth, in service of our innermost desires, in response to what breaks our hearts.

As we shift from searching to noticing, we learn to not only embrace ourselves and the other we’ve heretofore deemed as separate, but we fall—helplessly, rapturously—in love with life itself. This is the true meaning of self-love. Of self-actualization. It is the true mission of purpose, the promise of fulfillment: despite our knowing that we will one day lose this thing we love more than all else, we want nothing more than to give ourselves to it fully.

So, if you are feeling restless, stuck, hounded by the sense that there’s something more you’re meant to do but for the life of you, you don’t know what it is—or, you can’t overcome the fear that stands between you and that which you know your soul longs for…

Stop thinking. Stop researching. Stop making lists of pros and cons.

Instead, go outside. Leave your phone at home (seriously!). Be guided by pleasure rather than routine: notice the greens of the leaves, or the geometries of rooftops and windows and doorways, if you can see. Notice the texture of the ground beneath you, if you can touch. Listen to the layers of sound, if you can hear. Smell the trunks of trees, the grass, the crisp-edged, fallen leaf. Open your mouth and inhale, and taste the air you breathe.

Without judgment, without analysis, notice. Be curious. Notice your mind and the stories it wants to tell as it strives, in its delightfully predictable way, to make meaning of all that your body encounters.

If you practice this every day, your noticing will steadily give way to knowing. And if you lean into and surrender to this knowing, and identify simple turtle steps (what I often call “next right steps”) from within this space, you will discover that you already possess the answers, and that you carry your life’s compass inside.

Love,

Kirstin