This, too, is the Way

on purpose

There was a time I thought I knew the shape of my life.

I could feel it under my feet, like a path I’d always known, worn smooth by expectation and softened by hope. I didn’t need to see the whole way ahead. Just enough to keep walking. A kitchen table lit by morning sun, toast crumbs caught in the grain. Children growing, their voices rising like birdsong through the house. Time to make something of beauty, dough resting under linen, the scent of sourdough rising slow into the walls. A page half-filled with words. A rhythm that held, not perfect, but familiar- like the creak of old floorboards beneath bare feet, imperfect, but known. Like the way the earth softens just before the first wildflower appears.

Then, the ground shifted.

Not with drama. Not even with a warning. Just a quiet unraveling, routines undone, unsure of how to name any of it,  the invisible edges of our life fraying faster than I could mend them. The map I’d been following, penciled in with love and dreams and the kind of certainty you don’t question until it’s gone, no longer matched the terrain beneath me. I found myself in an unfamiliar land, the kind I hadn’t trained for, hadn’t named, and didn’t know how to move through.

I kept walking anyway.

For a long time, it felt like walking with my hands pressed over my eyes. Like entering a forest with no trail, branches brushing against my shoulders, air thick with the damp weight of things unspoken. I lost track of where I began. I counted time in teaspoons and prescriptions. I prayed in laundry loads, and the weight of a child’s body slumped against mine. I didn’t know if it counted. If I still counted.

Some days, I longed for the before, for the ease of motion, the illusion of control. Some days, I looked at the life I was living and felt like I was watching it from far away, like I’d drifted to the edge of the room. Like I’d become a witness to something I used to belong to.

But even then, even in the fog, something small kept pulsing.

The coffee brewing before dawn. The way light pooled on the wooden floor by mid-morning. My son’s laugh, sharp and sudden, breaking open the air like a branch snapped underfoot on soft ground.

The way he looked at me without question, without measure.  Not like I was holding it all together, but like I was holding him, and that was enough. 

Slowly, so slowly, I barely noticed. I began to feel the ground again. Not the old path. Not the one I’d planned. Something steadier. Wilder, maybe. There were days I still wished it different. Days I stood in the doorway of his room as he asked questions that had no answers. Yet, there were also days I wrote, days I noticed how the pine branches bent but didn’t break. Days I realized I was still here. Days that asked nothing of me but presence.

What I’ve learned, and it didn’t come quickly, is that purpose doesn’t always feel purposeful.

It doesn’t always look like momentum or clarity. Sometimes, it has no name at all, just a feeling that you’re meant to be here. Sometimes, it looks like lingering, like listening. Like reaching for a hand in the dark, like bearing witness to beauty that no one else sees. It’s the quiet kind of courage that never seeks for applause.

There is no neat bow at the end of this story. No lesson that wraps it clean. But I’ve stopped looking for one. I’ve stopped asking the path to explain itself. I watch the sky. I mark the turning seasons. I write down what I can, not because I’ve figured it out, but because writing reminds me I’m still alive to it.

This isn’t the life I pictured. But it’s mine, I love it to depths that words will never be able to express. It’s rooted. It’s real.  When I let it, it breathes.

So I walk. Not toward an answer, but deeper into the knowing, into the purpose.¹

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If these words met you somewhere tender, I’d be honored to hear what stirred.

• What has helped you keep walking when the way was unclear?

• What small things are reminding you that you’re still here?

There’s room in the comments for your quiet reflections — no pressure, just presence. We grow more whole when we witness each other’s in-between moments.

1. These words took shape, with much gratitude to

Beth Kempton

, from her {SoulCircle} Journal Note: PURPOSE