Earlier this year I set myself the intention word of purposeful. I was hoping this intention word would help me make more deliberate decisions around how I spent my time, energy and focus this year. What I wasn’t expecting is to be hit with burnout and loneliness; feelings of exhaustion that created apathy in me. This level of dull has resulted in countless doom scrolls and TV bingeing. I tried to muster up the energy to be purposeful but I have struggled to get there consistently.
This created a sense of disappointment in myself, like I had let myself down and have sabotaged an important chapter of my life. It took me some time to realise that my disappointment was a friend and not an enemy; so when I sat down with her to listen to her concerns, I realised she was only trying to remind me that I am capable of great things. Once disappointment and I made up, apathy creeped in, at first it was masked as a sense of resilience, like aha, I finally cracked the code for being relaxed in the face of adversity. But then I realised that I wasn’t showing up with resilience, I was switching off with carelessness. There was increasingly less and less energy left in me to give a F@?k.
A few weeks pass and on a walk it all of a sudden reveals itself to me, being purposeful is a skill, one that must be learned through feeling lost, distracted, disappointed and at times disconnected. How would I know what is important to me, and what I want to focus on, if I don’t have life testing my boundaries and beliefs? To become purposeful, I first need to understand the edges of being purposeless. I need to explore the things that I don’t like, don’t want and don’t need, so that I can become clear about how I want to navigate this hilly landscape we call life.
Whilst I don’t really know what lies in the horizon, I do know this, that progress doesn’t always show up in the shape of success and moving forward; progress can also look like mistakes, failures, pause and setbacks.
Being purposeful isn’t an endstate that I will arrive at, it is a life long practice that will require my curiosity, attention and energy. It is the practice of living life, by being alive.
Love Always,
M
Souloom™ 