On Forming Purpose

I used to think purpose was something you discovered. Like a hidden room everyone else eventually found, and if you paid enough attention or waited long enough, you’d stumble into it too. I kept waiting for that click. The moment where everything lined up and pointed in one clean direction.

Over time, the waiting got heavier. By my mid-50s, it wasn’t curiosity anymore. It was disappointment. Quiet. Private. The kind you don’t announce, even to yourself.

Reading the idea that purpose isn’t something you find but something you form didn’t feel comforting at first. It felt exposing. It showed me how long I’d been standing still, mistaking thinking for progress. I spent years trying to figure it out, assuming that not knowing meant I was behind, or worse, that I had missed my window.

I didn’t think of my life as abundant. I thought of it as unfinished. My interests came and went. The things that gave me energy felt too small, too ordinary to qualify as “purpose.” I assumed purpose had to arrive fully formed, loud, permanent. Anything else felt like avoidance.

Looking back, that thinking was rigid. If purpose is already present, made up of fragments and half-explored curiosities and moments where you feel most alive, then I wasn’t empty. I was impatient. Maybe also afraid. Because forming something means owning it. Discovering something lets you off the hook.

I also put a lot of pressure on purpose to be singular. One thing. One reason. As if choosing wrong would cancel everything else. But my actual life has never worked that way. Caring. Showing up. Paying attention. Staying curious. Those things were always there. I just didn’t call them purpose because they didn’t collapse into a tidy identity.

The idea that really stays with me is purpose being autotelic. Its own reward. I’ve spent a lot of time measuring meaning by outcomes. Progress. Recognition. Proof. If the payoff is always later, no wonder the present feels thin.

I didn’t arrive anywhere after reading this. But I do feel less accused by the question of purpose. Less like I failed an exam everyone else passed. Maybe purpose isn’t something I was supposed to have figured out by now. Maybe it’s something I’ve been forming quietly all along, without trusting it enough to name it.

For once, that doesn’t feel like settling. It just feels.

I Remain