As a holistic counselor and Dance/Movement Therapist, safety plays a large role in my work with people. We all need a safe harbor to come home to. When we don’t have that, we are never able to fully rest. But rest is not our purpose. Our purpose is to follow our purpose, then to rest so that we can continue to go back out and follow our purpose.
A harbor is not a destination. It is infrastructure. Nobody builds one so that boats can sit in it, they build one so that boats can come back. The harbor exists in service of the leaving. And yet most of us have it the other way around, arranging a life so carefully that the whole thing becomes a very well-appointed mooring, and then wondering why the water is so still.
There is a part of you that keeps the lines tied, and it is not lazy and it is not a coward. It is a harbormaster with a long memory. It remembers the year you went out and came back with the hull stove in. Its whole job is to make sure that does not happen twice, and it does that job the only way it knows, by keeping you where it can see you.
There is always a risk in following our purpose. We may have to sacrifice something practical to live it, like limiting our social life to write that book we’ve been meaning to. We may have to give up a belief about who we are. We must always risk failing, as that’s true of any action we take.
The belief is the expensive one. Practical sacrifices announce themselves and you can budget for them. What you cannot budget for is the morning you understand that the person you have been telling everyone you are is not going to survive the crossing. That is not a loss you grieve once. It comes back every few miles.
If we do not take the risk to live our life’s purpose we will never be fully satisfied. We may have a decent life, but there will always be that nagging dissatisfaction, the “I wish I would have…”
There is a way I can tell, before my mind has caught up, that I have been tied up too long. Something goes flat behind the sternum, like a sail still rigged and doing nothing. The days are fine. Nothing is wrong. That flatness is the tell. Your body is the authority on your body. Try it on, and if it isn’t yours, go find your own version, because the flatness is quiet and it can go on for years without ever raising its voice.
Two things most writing about purpose leaves out. The first is that this advice is nearly always written by people with somewhere to fall. If you are the only income in your house, if there is no savings and nobody behind you, then “take the risk” is not wisdom, it is a description of somebody else’s circumstances. Purpose does not require a dramatic departure. It can be one hour, before anyone else is awake, held to for a year. That is a real crossing, made in a small boat.
The second is that not every impulse to leave is a purpose. Some of it is weather, and some of it is a river that was never yours to ride. The difference is not how strongly you feel it. It is whether the thing still calls you when it is boring. Purpose survives being boring. Restlessness does not.
The line everyone hangs on this is that a ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. It gets credited to Paulo Coelho and it isn’t his. It belongs to John A. Shedd, who set it down in a book of aphorisms in 1928. He did not say the harbor was a mistake. He said it was not the point.
The boats I have admired were never the ones that went furthest. They were the ones still going out. There is a particular kind of old person who unties the lines on a Tuesday for no reason anybody else can see. Be that one.