41. Search and Rescue for My Purpose
December 26, 2025
I am taking a deeper dive on Purpose this week, in terms of what it could mean to spend time on finding your purpose. In our Third Quarter of Life, after the kids are (mostly) raised and our finances are (hopefully) in order, we can turn our attention to finding our purpose. If you are still raising kids or grandkids, living paycheck-to-paycheck, dealing with health issues (body comes first), or feeling lonely and isolated (community comes second), then working on finding your purpose is not likely to be your highest priority. When you’ve moved out of those spaces or when you have a temporary breather from those demands, that may be a time you can start to consider starting along this part of the journey.
What is meant by “Find your Purpose”? I have mentioned before that setting aside our ego is a critical part of this journey. Deepak Chopra says that our LinkedIn page is our ego page. All of our accolades, awards, accomplishments, professional recognitions – these are for our ego. Yes, our professional work may line up with our purpose, but it may not. Do not stop with your employment history when looking for your purpose. Here’s a hint – if you are doing something mostly because you want to be able to put it on your resume and post about it on social media, it is likely not your purpose. That being said, there is nothing wrong with wanting to do things that you are proud to put on your resume and post about on social media. It’s not one or the other. Those things are important for our wellness and livelihood. But I am encouraging you to consider something beyond that as your purpose.
Now, what does this mean, specifically, in terms of what we can do to search? This discovering would look like devoting time to (1) getting to know yourself and (2) to being out in the world (figuratively or literally) discovering needs and wants and ways that could be something that you could fill. I have written in a few past essays about tools I have used to get to know myself better, for example, revisiting your childhoods joys as I wrote about in Connecting with the Child Inside and doing a life review in Writing Your Origin Story. Listening to your spirit by tuning in to what you get excited about is another one. This does take a bit of a step away from the busy, as I wrote about in another essay, Busy is the new Lazy. I also recommend a book by Emily Esfahani Smith called “Power of Meaning.”
Your purpose is an agreement between you and the universe. Between you and your God, if God is part of your belief system. Finding it is a feeling, not a logical undertaking. I finished reading “Conscious Living, Conscious Aging” by Ron Penvy. In Pevny’s telling, eldering means breaking away from the existing patterns and creating something new, something unique for each one of us. So we are on a scavenger hunt, as I’ve mentioned in a previous essay, to find our purpose. I hope you are able to take some time, when it’s available for you, to start this search for your purpose, for what lights you up. It’s a journey worth taking.
