Liberat.es
Dipping my toe into purpose
I’ve been thinking about purpose. I see it everywhere these days. Most notably, it is central to the messaging by some folks I’ve connected with that are consultants in organizations, talking about purpose as something that should be behind our work in the world. I couldn’t agree more, but (there it is…you knew it was coming) I’d say that the way we think about something like purpose, especially in relationship to our work, is incredibly surface level, and it doesn’t get to what is actually possible. In fact, it doesn’t get to what is already true.
Truth be told, I don’t have much time today to explore this, unfortunately. I started to write about it in my journal this morning, and it’s clear there’s a lot to explore. But I wanted to introduce the thinking here.
Etymologically, it seems that there are a couple of branches in relationship to the word purpose. My favorite (which, in some ways, is cheating a bit) is:
Porposer - to put forth
I like this because it brings the notion of purpose from being about something we are going to do to being about the very fact that we are. This is the distinction that, to me, could profoundly shift the way we talk about purpose at all in the world.
But I think I might be getting ahead of myself. Hopefully I’ll dig into this more soon.
To be continued.