When we think about purpose, we typically think of our life’s overarching aim; our true calling; the thing we were put on earth to do.
But each individual’s purpose encompasses more than this, and in fact exists across three horizons that stretch from the imminent and concrete to the distant and transcendent.
In the first horizon of purpose, our aim is to turn anarchy into order. We live to push back on a universe that is ever moving toward entropy. By engaging in small daily acts of upkeep — making the messy clean, the disheveled neat, the chaotic organized — we hold back the decay and disarray that would engulf us and others. While everything will endlessly revert to disorder, we live to create brief but shining moments when the world is set right.
In the second horizon of purpose, our aim is to convert intentions into actions. We live to transform potential energy into kinetic. Each of us regularly has ideas, both big (“I should start a business”) and small (“I should text so-and-so”), that we can either fulfill or ignore. We live to minimize life’s woulda, coulda, shouldas and maximize the satisfaction of following through.
The third horizon is where we find Purpose with a capital P. Herein lies the big why of our lives, the hope of making a unique, meaningful contribution to the world. This purpose arises from the intersection of a need and one’s particular gifts. That might involve creating a revolutionary invention or writing a bestselling book, but it could also take the form of being the parent of excellent humans, the buoyer or corraler of loved ones, the leader of a community.
While it can sometimes be difficult to find the third horizon of purpose, there’s one definite prerequisite to discovering it: laboring diligently in the other two.
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