I read a post by Toby on the topic of purpose as a general concept in life and found it very insightful. His post is far more insightful than this one is going to be. Go read his blog at the link above to get some excellent definitions and thoughtful consideration regarding the meaning of purpose.
But Toby’s words did get me thinking about different aspects of purpose in my own life and how the presence or absence of reasons for what I do might affect me.
What is my purpose?
I am truly struggling with my own purpose at the moment. I thought I had it all figured out post retirement, but my mental collapse in December undid my confidence. I thought not having a purpose was a purpose unto itself: waking up each day to simply experience the day and to take joy from the sunlight and bird song should be enough to sustain me. And I think these things would be enough if it weren’t for the defects in my mind.
Something about that calm did not sit well with my broken brain. For decades I had a sense of purpose through work. I had plans to follow, complex coding, design, and debugging tasks to perform, team members to support. People relied upon me and I on them and even though it sometimes felt like there were few rewards there was a constant stream of feedback on my efforts. I feel like I have to have that tick-tock of some sort of daily todo list with activities that suit my mind, the feedback from peers, and the sense of progress. Tasks around the house are all well and good, but they apparently don’t scratch the itch the same way my work life once did.
I suspect I need something akin to what my brain worked on before retirement to keep the demons at bay. The medications I’m taking are doing the heavy lifting here of course, but having those daily tasks accompanied by some sense of accomplishment will help. But exactly what kinds of accomplishments do I need?
I feel that writing regularly in my blog is in the right domain for my mind’s health. It could be that it simply fits neatly with the well-worn ruts from the work I used to do. I spent a healthy portion of each day debugging problems and documenting solutions to guide other people, and to some extent my blog is like that. At least it is like that at its peak effectiveness: I don’t claim every post I write to be a ‘solution’ or a ‘guide’, but the intention to share something that might be helpful to someone else is definitely there.
Drawing to a close
Finding a purpose is, for me, a part of my mental health plan. As Toby alludes to based on my reading of his words: purpose is not necessarily something you define at the start. It is something that develops through the doing of other activities in our lives: we find our purposes, we don’t set them then work towards them.
Perhaps sharing my thoughts in my blog is purely a way of getting those thoughts off my chest- this blog is, after all, a reflection of the messiness that is my mind. Possibly the sharing helps someone who visits here find their own answers: maybe I touch on some topic that sparks an interest that ends up diverting entirely away from where I started. And it is possible that something I write here outright answers a question that has been burning in someone’s mind for some time.
Any one or all of these things I list could be a reason for me to blog. I’m not really sure if any of them are my purpose for blogging specifically, nor do I know where blogging sits in my overall life purpose at this moment. I do know, however, that blogging is a way for me to unlock ideas in my head and make them visible, and that is what is driving me to write at the moment. That will have to do for now as a ‘purpose’ for my blogging and a reason to keep it amongst the things I do with regularity.
The header image for this post was AI generated using ChatGPT. It is a bit more ‘fluffy’ than I wanted, but it is good enough for AI generated stuff