This seems like the place to start. Or at least a place to start. What’s important is the starting – easy to not do when perfectionism brings procrastination and I’ve spent so many weeks already writing a ‘first post’. That piece hasn’t turned out exactly as I’d envisaged. It feels too long and is more concerned with my career than intended, and really, I’m not telling the story of a remarkable life so far so is it really all that interesting?
But the unremarkableness is kind of the point of starting this blog: I’m ordinary and I’m looking for meaning and purpose, a sense of fulfilment, in my life. That’s not unique, plenty of people feel like this. But I believe plenty of people go on feeling like this, never finding the things that make them feel like they are living a meaningful life, but also never really doing anything deliberate or taking intentional steps towards finding out what that might be, likely for many reasons (no judgement there).
Maybe it’s something that just fades into the background for some people as life moves on. And I suspect for people who become parents much meaning and purpose is found in enabling their children to lead a ‘good life’. At the other end of the spectrum, I’m well-aware too that there are those whose only concern is putting food on the table for their families who either don’t have the headspace, time, or generally the luxury to even think about living differently.
I don’t want to be someone who never finds fulfilment in life. I’m not unhappy, let me be clear on that – I’m the happiest, calmest, and ‘least lost’ I’ve ever been which is why I feel like I’m in a great space to embark on this journey now.
To be clear, I’m not writing as any kind of expert on anything – again that’s kind of the point. I’m very much at the beginning of something and I want this blog to have a bit of a ‘live’ feel to it as I try some stuff. There will be some failures – I hope! Yes, really, because I’m not good at failing and it doesn’t happen often which means I’m not experimenting and taking enough risks. But I expect some successes too.
The only thing I’m expert in is me, and it’s this that I want to leverage and use as my starting point. I’ve worked hard to get to where I am, and whilst I believe in that ‘what got you here won’t get you there’ idea, I want to look back and reflect on what has worked for me so that I can build on that to take me forwards. In the light of my own self-knowledge, I want to take deliberate and intentional steps to live differently. I want to prove that this can be done – at this age when I don’t have a strong idea about what that could look like.
Knowing and having the self-trust that you can change your life is both empowering and exciting. If I should reach this goal of finding meaning and purpose, to live a life I truly love, I’d want all the other people like me to know how I did it. Because if I can do this, so can you.