Are We "Finding Our Purpose" All Wrong?

or - what flavour is your sh*t sandwhich?

Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed.

Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.

Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. We’ve all heard it. Maybe even said it. But is it true?

Are we going about ‘finding our purpose’ all wrong?

What if the notion that our ‘aligned,’ purposeful life will be full of only joy and ease is getting in the way of us actually finding the thing that will bring a sense of meaning and purpose to our lives? What if our collective conflation of ease and happiness is flat out wrong? What if happiness itself is the wrong goal?

I’ve been thinking about all this a lot as we move through this season of transition. For the past 15 years I have been lucky enough to do work that brings me an immense sense of purpose, meaning and joy.

As we move forward into a new and as yet uncertain future, I’ve been mulling over how best to structure my work life after the move. Looking back and asking myself - If I had to do it over again, what would I do differently? What am I doing that - knowing what I know now - I wouldn’t have started? What logic made sense on paper, but disintegrated when my feet met the soil?

If we want to live a big, beautiful, purpose-driven life, we need to get good at asking more beautiful questions.

The quality of our questions determine the quality of our lives. As I’ve asked myself my own list of questions, I’ve been struck by how much they’ve changed since we first embarked on this adventure so many years ago.

The biggest change, by far, is that I’m not asking myself what would make me happy. I’m asking myself - What’s my favourite flavour of shit sandwich?

I know. Not really the journaling prompt of daydreams. But stay with me.

Here’s the thing. That whole shtick about not working a day in your life? It’s a bunch of bull. Here on the farm I have had the honour of walking in my life’s purpose - nourishing my community, stewarding the soil and joyfully rebelling against a system that puts profits and control before people or the planet.

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I LOVE what I do. I also have never worked so dang hard in my life.

So if that isn’t true, what other of our assumptions about purpose are wrong?

Once we free ourselves to ask that more beautiful question, the notion of what a life of purpose can look like opens up into a deliciously vast sea of possibility. What if chasing ease and alignment is taking us further, not closer, to a life of purpose? What if happiness isn’t the most powerful goal? What if a life of purpose, fulfillment and joy isn’t found in ease, but instead lies on the other side of grit, effort and a whole hell of a lot of hard work?

What if our goal shouldn’t be to fall in love with solutions, but instead to find problems we can fall in love with? What if there could be joy found in the shit sandwiches of life?

Ya know, it’s a shame that we’ve villainized discomfort culturally. It makes sense though, right? What would all those corporations sell us if they couldn’t push that most powerful, primal button - freedom from suffering? But what if our search for a life of comfort is precisely the thing that is causing us all to feel so disconnected, lonely, sad and unmoored from any sense of purpose or meaning in our lives?

Maybe it’s time to fall in love with our problems, instead of trying to eliminate them completely.

As our family has moved through this strange, uprooting season, one of my mantras has been - I’m grateful for my problems. I say it often, and I mean it.

We tell ourselves that if we just get the promotion, or the new job, or a better job, or a partner or whatever else we feel is missing, that we’ll finally be happy. When we have money or a partner or a bigger house, we’ll finally be free of our problems. Of course, that isn’t true. We’ll just have new, different, problems.

So why not intentionally seek out better problems? Problems that will move us towards purpose, instead of away from it? Choosing my problems has been one of the most empowering mindset shifts I’ve made since my spectacular breakdown breakthrough of 2010, when I burned down my successful career to pursue a slower life.

When I worked in human rights, my problems included things like worrying I would ruin someone’s life with a wrong decision, or that my name would be leaked on the national news in connection with a controversial case, or even that a client might kill me. These problems eventually found me standing in the middle of Robson Street on a beautiful Tuesday lunch hour, sobbing uncontrollably, terrified and burnt out to the point that I left my office that day and never went back.

The funny thing is - from the outside, that career was the epitome of a life of ‘purpose’.

I was doing important, meaningful work, helping people through some of the worst days of their lives. But those problems? They did me in. Working at the Human Rights Tribunal might have been someone’s purpose, but it wasn’t mine.

This is part of where we tend to get tripped up. We think that purpose needs to come packaged in some specific container, look a certain way, feel a certain way. Specifically, we are taught that our purpose is something we find, instead of something we choose.

But what if a life of purpose isn’t something that is gifted from the heavens onto a glorious few lucky souls? What if a life of purpose is a collage we make with our own hands, a garden we plant over years of effort - sowing seeds, watering, weeding and pruning? What if it is a set of intentionally acquired skills, not some innate gift we’re born with?

Might we feel more empowered in our pursuit of purpose if we understood it as something we could create, instead of find?

I noticed in art school how this manifested in the process of creative work. There were two types of art students -

• those who waited for inspiration, who would show up at the weekly crit empty handed, moaning that the muse hadn’t shown.

• those who also found themselves out of ideas, but instead simply got working.

But - how do you start without ideas?

You get moving, without judgement and with lots of curiosity, attention and grace. You put yourself in the space where work can happen. You surround yourself by other people making art. You look at lots of art, you read books, you listen to music, you go out into nature or your city and you LOOK. You recognize that if you suspend judgement about what inspiration should look like, you’ll find it everywhere.

You simply start making marks on paper. You draw anything and everything you happen on in your daily life. One semester I drew the same potted plant for over a month, everyday. I didn’t have any ideas and I didn’t know where the work was taking me. All I knew was that the important thing was to just keep drawing.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. - Picasso

You must trust that as long as you keep working, keep exploring - with an open and curious heart - inspiration will find you.

Crafting our purpose from scratch is difficult, uncomfortable work.

Accepting responsibility for our own sense of purpose is hard. We have to be willing to sit with that discomfort if we want to build a meaningful life. This is why this idea of purpose being easeful or effortless is such a dangerous belief.

Even as a teenager, I found it frustrating how many of my peers held this set of beliefs about passion. I spent years and endless hours learning how to draw and paint, and through that focused effort, my talent and passion for the arts was born. But everyone around me treated it as though the talent and passion were bestowed from the divine.

This annoyed me to no end. I didn’t love art because I was somehow naturally gifted. I loved art and had some level of skill because I made a choice, and then followed that choice with persistent, consistent, focused effort.

My purpose, passion and sense of meaning in my life were what they were because that is where I chose to focus my effort. It required being willing to suck, first. To make shitty art. To be a beginner. To subject myself to the cruel and unusual punishment of daily crits by my professors and peers in order to get better. To keep showing up every day at the studio and draw that damn yucca tree for weeks on end until the log jam in my creative waters finally broke free.

Most of us would prefer to accept the belief that purpose is given, not created, because it frees us from the difficult work of crafting that story ourselves. The good news is, we can, at any time, choose to change our minds.

So, no matter where my focus takes me - the pastures of the farm or my writing desk or my studio or my beloved farm community - I have decided to choose my favourite flavour of shit sandwich, instead of waiting for an imaginary life of purpose to find me, free from discomfort, effort and pain.

Could it be that grit and perseverance are more important than innate clarity or natural talent when pursuing our purpose?

There is a great moment where a young musician asked Steve Martin how to achieve the same kind of success he has in his career as a banjo player. Steve said - get really famous for something else, first.

And when folks ask him about that, he always says -

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

And this, I think, is a great guidepost for the pursuit of purpose. It also, Steve says, is an answer most folks aren’t willing to heed. It takes work and effort and acceptance of the truth that being better at something, having talent, takes an awful lot of work.

You have to get good, first. Talent comes from effort.

( In that vein - So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport is a great read.)

We also need to remember that even when we DO find work that fills us up, not everything related to purposeful work will be enjoyable. Some of the stuff we have to do within our life of purpose will be downright miserable. We might even suck at parts of it. If we only seek ease and alignment, we might inadvertently rule out exactly the vocation that our heart is needs, which again - brings us back to our shit sandwich.

Farming well, nourishing my community and healing the soil, is a core part of my own life’s purpose. It is also bloody hard work.

There are a million easier ways to earn a living than farming. There are lots of aspects of farming that I absolutely hate. There is no end to the problems we face on a daily basis, many of which can be life-or-death for ourselves or our animals.

But these problems? They’re MY favourite flavour of shit sandwich.

I’d much rather try to figure out how to get 20 escaped pigs back to the barn than worry about being stabbed by an angry client at the Human Rights Tribunal. I’ll take white knuckling financial valleys over navigating bureaucratic red tape. I LOVE the challenge of taking an abused, dead expanse of dirt and transforming it - over many years - into a thriving, living ecosystem of vibrant soil.

I choose these problems because I have chosen this work. Because I find satisfaction in watching this beautiful place transform, to breathe back to life. To notice the wildlife returning; the bees vibrating with joy in the cherry tree, the sparrows taking up residence in the barn, even the aphids that attack my plum tree each year, I am so grateful for. Because all of them, even the pests, are a sign that this space is healing.

And here is the paradox. If I had looked for a life of ease and alignment, I would never have found this level of joy and purpose. It is the difficulty, the challenge, the discomfort that makes the work satisfying and worthwhile - that makes it purposeful.

How bout you? What flavour is your shit sandwich?

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Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.