What Purpose Demands

Compromising your surroundings and the familiar for the pursuit of your purpose is something that is mentioned when starting your journey. However, the journey itself is not often talked about, unless it is lived or seen - if not, we cannot truly understand it. It is about giving it your all to achieve your dream. Yet it is easy to give up on your dream when you have been deviating from and separating yourself from it for the sake of conforming to the world around you or the rules that have been imposed throughout your upbringing. Yes, rules allow for order and a certain form of stability, so we have a grounded sense and centre, but they also limit us from being who we are truly meant to be.

I can say from experience that pursuing what you love is a job on its own; it shouldn’t feel like it, but it is. It is about being persistent and consistent in the pursuit of your dreams and disregarding the external noise. And I say that it is a job on its own because it requires practice, determination, and discipline. It is along the way, when we have come to clarify more of what we want in life (in whatever way it might be), that we get the opportunity to face the things that we must compromise.

For myself, I came to find that my purpose is to help people, in whatever way that aligns with me, and along with that comes believing in myself. But as someone who would live up to a lot of people’s expectations, choosing myself over others was slightly harder to do. Slowly but surely, I found myself in the duality of expectations and the balance of pleasures.

One thing that I found myself realizing was that it is not necessarily starting at the root of the problem to start healing, but rather the creation of new inner systems and patterns to change your approach and response to things consciously. Once you have these new patterns, when you are ready to face the roots of the problems, if the old patterns continue to occur, you can approach them knowing that you now have a different response, which will allow you to see your old narrative with a different perspective. This is a compromise when shifting your present (or future) to pursue what aligns:

the sacrifice of your old narrative comes with the choice to perceive and see things differently to create a new one.

For this, I have found that it takes repetition. At times, the old patterns and narratives take over, which is a chance for you to observe them, but also to give yourself a chance to rewrite them. So, are you ready to make that change, or start the pursuit of your dreams if you know them, knowing that there are compromises and sacrifices you will have to make relating to the familiar?

Z.