Listen to popular culture and you’d think we’re either born with purpose or can pick it off a rail and slip it on.

Reality is, we can’t live our purpose if we haven’t grown it.

The kind of purposes we put on like a new shirt can be taken off again just as easily.  Whilst, thinking we’re born with purpose doesn’t value the journeys we make.

It all begins with turning up: the alchemy of here I am and this is what I have.  We’re explorers of life, identifying our curiosity and deeply focusing on it:

‘As a Maker of Fire you may or may not have religion but you must have conviction and compassion.  You must have faith, hope, and love.  If you have your “why,” the “how” will come.’*

Joseph Jaworski suggests: ‘One knows one is on the right track if the revelation is progressively more beautiful.’**  Jaworski is describing sudden illumination, when understanding and realisation come because they want to come to us.  Behind this, hidden, is a journey of turning up and learning and trying and failing.  Lots of hard work comes to fruition, usually in a quiet, unexpected moment.^

Here it begins to get exciting because when purposeful lives connect, there’s the possibility of a significant shift in our world:

‘Here is a summertime truth, abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole.  Community doesn’t just create abundance -community is abundance.’^^

(*From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(^This is the experience a group of us had at the weekend, when things appeared, though we’d been turning up and working hard for two years.)
(^^From Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak.)