The Diffuse Nature of Purpose

 

I ran into an old schoolmate recently. Let’s call him Anthony. We hadn't seen each other in years.  He was several years ahead of me at university, and back then, medical school was not kind to him. He resat most of his exams. More than once, I imagine, he must have wondered whether he was pursuing the right career.

He's a doctor now. Working at a private hospital, well paid, living in a house that comes with the job. By every visible measure, he made it.

But it's what he told me about how he made it that stayed with me.

He said it was my older brother — his fellow medical student— who kept him going. Not through some rousing speech about perseverance. My brother never once sat him down and told him not to give up; he simply kept getting back up after his own setbacks, semester after semester, and Anthony watched him do it. That was enough. Somewhere in watching my brother refuse to quit, Anthony found the will to keep going himself.

My brother has no idea he did this. As far as I know, he still doesn't.

We've been taught to look for mountain-sized purpose

When we think of people who "fulfilled their purpose," we tend to reach for a handful of names — Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa. People whose lives became historical inflection points. People whose purpose was documented, and epoch-shaping.

While it's a beautiful thing to be inspired by lives like these, it can also quietly wreck you into thinking- without meaning to- that your purpose is supposed to be loud, public, and visible. The kind of thing that ends up in a textbook or goes viral. And if your life doesn't look like that, it's easy to start thinking you're wasting it.

What if your purpose is not tied to one single event at all? What if it is something spread thin across thousands of untraceable invisible moments?

The laughing Buddha

Some time ago, I was in a very low place. I went for a walk to see if that would help shake off the blues.

On my walk, I passed by a Nigerian nanny with a baby strapped to her back — a bald, beautiful Chinese boy, maybe seven or eight months old. The baby’s eyes met mine, and, in that instant, he broke into the widest, most unguarded smile I've ever seen. The smile turned into a giggle, and I couldn't help but smile right back, fully, involuntarily.

Something in me lifted. The clouds that sent me outside in the first place just cleared.

I looked back once after I had walked past them. He'd already stopped smiling. The moment had closed as quickly as it opened, gone the second we were out of each other's line of sight.

What were the odds of that? A baby who couldn't have known a single thing about the day I was having, smiling and completely changing my day. He'll never know what that did for me. I don't think he was trying to do anything at all. He was just being seven months old, delighted by a stranger's face.

To this day, when things feel heavy, that smile is often the first thing my mind reaches for. It still works.

The purpose we don't get to measure

We're told, often correctly, that our purpose is tied to service — to acts done for other people. But I think we picture service too narrowly, as something intentional and deliberate: a plan, a mission, a global cause you can name.

My brother's purpose, in that particular thread of his life, was simply to keep showing up to his own struggle without an audience. The baby's purpose, in that one instant, was an unguarded smile he'll never remember giving.

And when you look closely, you find this everywhere, disguised as “nothing”:

• The office worker who greets the cleaner by name every single morning and has no idea it's the only warm interaction that person has all day;
• The classmate who sits with the one person eating alone, not because anyone asked them to, but because it didn't occur to them not to:
• The neighbour whose porch light has been on every night for fifteen years — a small, steady thing that other neighbours have quietly come to rely on without ever mentioning it;
• The stranger who lets you merge in traffic, and forgets you exist thirty seconds later, while you're still thinking about how decent that felt;
• A comment left under a stranger's post at 2 a.m., typed in under a minute, that turns out to be the exact sentence someone needed to read that night.

None of these people know what their actions did for the other.

Most of them never will.

That's not a flaw in the system; it might just be the system: purpose, distributed and working in doses too small to trace.

So, if you've ever looked at your life and quietly worried that it doesn't add up to much, that you haven't done the big thing yet, the thing that would finally justify all of it — I'd gently ask you to hold that thought a little more loosely.

Because you may already have done it. Multiple times.

In a hallway.

In a comment section.

On a walk.

In the simple, undramatic act of getting back up after a setback without ever knowing that someone was watching you closely enough to be changed by your decisions.

We keep waiting for the one big moment that will prove our life mattered. But it may be that the moment was never meant to be just one. It was always meant to be many — scattered, small, and mostly invisible especially to the person living them.