Finding your direction
A creative wellbeing workshop on understanding your source of purpose and fulfilment
Each month, I invite you to explore a series of creative exercises to support your emotional wellbeing.
I’ve been making my own deck of creative “oracle” cards - prompts designed to encourage reflection on key themes, that you can engage with through your creative practice. This month, I’ve been thinking about the idea of direction:
What does direction mean to you?
We’re just tiny bundles of atoms encased in stardust, stumbling around this little spinning orb in the vastness of space - how are we supposed to find our way?
Where does your sense of direction come from in life? How do you know where you want to go and how you want to get there? How do you know when you’ve “arrived”?
We all need some sort of internal compass, guiding us as to how we want to move through our lives. Otherwise we find ourselves drifting, feeling lost and uncertain. As the self-aware, introspective beings that humans are, a sense of direction, of purpose, is crucial to nurturing feelings of fulfilment.
You don’t have to change the world
I spent a lot of time worrying about my purpose. I felt like I needed some grand reason for existing in the universe. And even though I run a diversity and inclusion consultancy - striving to make the world of work more fair and positive for more people - and work to support people’s emotional health through creative wellbeing, I still didn’t feel like I was justifying my use of oxygen on this planet. Somehow, nothing I could do felt like enough.
It took me a long time to realise - and, to be honest, I’m still learning this - that a purpose doesn’t have to be significant. We don’t owe anyone for our place here, we don’t have to justify our existence. No one is waiting with a clipboard to check that we’ve given back as much as, or more than, we’ve taken.
I think I got a little bit obsessed with questions like, “How do you want to be rememebered?” and “What kind of life do you want to look back on when you’re old?” But then I came to see that I didn’t want to be forever striving to create something I could feel satisfied about at some potential future moment. What’s the point in living a life that you may never benefit from? Life isn’t meant to be a succession of struggles in the hopes of possibly feeling good about it at the end. I want to feel good about my life right now. (I wrote about that a couple of months ago.)
I do want to have a positive impact in the world, because my values tell me that’s a good way to live. I do have goals I want to work towards, because they’re things that matter to me. But, ultimately, I want a sense of purpose that is centred on getting the most out of life that I can. I want to follow a direction that takes me to joy, authenticity, experience, love and wholeness. My purpose is fuelled by my sense of what makes me happy, and what makes me me.
That’s what direction means to me… what does it mean to you?
Let’s explore that idea with a few creative exercises… I suggest you set aside around an hour and a half to work through all these in a single session, but you can split them up and do one each day if you’re short on time.
The running order looks a little like this:
Guided Journalling - 15 minutes
You Cloud - 10 minutes
Life Compass - 20 minutes
Pattern Matching - 20 minutes
Bring it to Life - 20 - 30 minutes (or more if you’re in the zone)
Here we go!