A common experience to both creative work and the purpose quest is a particular type of disorientation which affects being able to see where to go and what to do. It feels like being surrounded by fog. 

Fog is a low lying cloud of tiny water droplets. In these cases, it feels as if each droplet is a decision with many possible outcomes, each of which requires more decisions, and so on. The amount of options obscures the ability to find the ‘right’ ones. Sometimes I think the quintessential question on purpose is “but what should I do?"

On a creative project, I find that fog descends after the initial burst of work, around the time when I lift my head and become aware of the gulf between what I have done so far and where I need to get to. At this point, the size of the cloud of unknowns and what-ifs that lie ahead can be overwhelming. If I attempt to orient myself using my goal, I must also engage with the despair of feeling so far away from it. This can drain the energies needed to progress.

I recently experienced the fog when working on a brand identity project. This time, rather than peer into the shrouded distance, I looked for a way to work with something within reach. I chose not to wrestle with the unknowns and instead engaged with what I could see: the fonts, the colours, the shapes. These were things I could manipulate and get direct feedback from. I think it’s useful to note that I had not walked away from the project goal entirely here. It was still out there in the fog. I had just chosen to free myself from the burden of using it as a reference point. At this point I was not looking for something that answered the brief. I was looking for something which I thought was good.

Our sense of what is good is highly personal. We might pretend to others that we think something is good, but we can’t fake the particular feeling that something we think is good gives us. While I was playing around with the design elements, I was alert for the electric traces of this feeling. For me, these are the subtle indicators of the right direction. Sometimes, these tiny sparks of feedback that come from doing something good can create a chain reaction that can illuminate a path to your goal. Even if not, time spent doing that which you find to be good, can help build a quality which is necessary to make progress in times of uncertainty: hope

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is.

Vaclav Havel from ‘The Impossible Will Take A Little Time’ by Paul Loeb (h/t Brain Pickings)

At the beginning of 2019, I was very low on hope. I had been out of work for an uncomfortable amount of time, none of the doors I was pushing were opening and our family savings were running low. Instead of continuing to spend all my time hunting for the path towards work - whether meaningful or not - I decided to put part of my time into doing something good. Inspired by Emily’s 100 conversations on purpose (and before I had the opportunity to collaborate on QOP), I started finding people to speak to about their creative practices at work, which is one of my favourite topics. I had no particular goal in mind other than to understand how different people experience creativity. During these conversations, it was not that the fog went away. It was just that I was not looking at it. And while I was not looking at the fog, hope began to grow.

Vaclav Havel continues his meditation on hope with this:

 Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Is there a correlation here, between things we find good and those that make sense? When the combination of elements for my brand identity project started to come together it felt as if they were making sense. When I was speaking with people about their creative work, it made sense that my own work would lie in the area of building creative capability. Even though I could not see a way forward in either situation, the actions that made sense generated small amounts of hope. This provided impetus to keep going, even when I couldn’t see a path in front of me.

Sometimes the size of the challenge can be enough to stop us from attempting it. Even breaking it down into smaller chunks can still expose us to the despair of distance. In some ways, it doesn’t matter whether the marathon you have signed up for is 26.2 miles or 32,400 steps. What matters is lacing up your shoes, taking a lungful of air and enjoying the act of running (even if you might have to stop for a breather just down the road).

In a similar way, questions such as ‘what is my purpose’ can feel so big that they induce a fog of hopelessness rather than the clarity of inspiration. If you feel as if you’re stuck here, experiment with asking these questions instead:

What makes sense to me? 

What do I find good?

How can I do more of that? 

Be sure to let your fellow questioners here at QOP know how you get on.

Further reading:

Dan Ariely Why We’re Attached To Our Own Creations Even When They’re Ugly