Three Places to Look
A few weeks ago, I wrote that purpose is not something you have but something you are. You are a river, I wrote. Not the architect of a river. I believed it as I wrote it. I still do.
But beautiful sentences have a way of leaving you somewhere you didn’t expect.
Something you are.
It sounds solid, settled. As if, once found, it would stay found. But it isn’t. A river is always itself and never the same water. Are is not a fixed state; it’s a present tense, and the present never holds still.
That changes everything about where I look. If purpose were something I have, I could find it once and keep it, name it, frame it, check it off. But something I am is only ever here, now, moving. It can’t be just found. It has to be recognised. Again and again, because it keeps evolving.
So, there I was. Again seeking. Again asking.
Where do I look? How do I know I’m in contact with the thing I just claimed I couldn’t construct?
For weeks after publishing that piece, those questions stayed with me. Fragments arrived. A thought while driving. A cue during a meal. Something that surfaced in meditation and was gone before I could hold it. None of them felt complete. All of them felt connected.
Then, one random morning, in my car — I don’t remember where I was going — they assembled themselves. Weeks earlier, I’d written about the question “Who am I?” — how I’d stopped trying to answer it head-on and started asking what story I was writing instead. That question had never fully left me. And now it came back changed, no longer one question but three:
Who am I?
Who do I walk with?
Who do I serve?
I pulled out my phone and recorded them before they could leave. I knew they were important. I just didn’t yet know why.
What I’ve come to understand, in the days since, is this: the trouble with starting from why is that why is always one abstraction removed from where you actually live. You can’t see a why. You can’t touch it, measure it, or check whether it’s still true. You can only name it — and then hope that name still fits next year.
Who is always present. Who is what you woke up as this morning, who sat across from you at breakfast, whose life you altered slightly before lunch. Who is observable. And purpose, if it’s real, has to be visible in the who. Otherwise, it isn’t doing anything.
Who is the form your purpose is taking right now. And the form changes. That’s the point. A map of who can be used at any time, in any season, because it doesn’t ask you to commit to a destination; it asks you to read your reflection in moving water.
Where do you look for it, then?
In three places, I’ve found.
Through those three questions that arrived together and have stayed with me since.
These questions are not a framework. Nor a sequence to complete. They are places to look, anytime you want to recognise which form your purpose is taking today in and through your who.
I’m in India as I finish writing this. And I brought these questions with me. Not because I believe the answers are here. But so they can help me stay in contact with something that keeps moving.
What follows is what I caught along the way, expanded into invitations you can sit with. Not assignments. Not a workshop.
Just three places to look.
Who am I?
Not who I say I am. Who I’m actually becoming, by the weight of what I do. And who I want to become when I look at myself in the mirror.
If I keep moving exactly as I’ve moved this past month — same habits, same attention, same energy spent on the same things — who am I quietly becoming?
Who do I want to become? Not the polished version. The one that would feel like a relief to inhabit.
Where do those two meet today? What is the honest distance between them?
Who do I walk with?
The people whose presence shapes me, whether I notice it or not. And the ones I would want by my side, when I walk forward.
Who are the three to five people I’ve spent the most time with lately? In their company, do I expand or do I shrink? Do I speak more truly, or do I adjust?
Who would I want to walk with? Not as admiration from a distance — as actual companionship. What is the quality of presence I’m reaching for?
To attract that company, what would I need to be walking as?
Who do I serve?
Not in the abstract. In the concrete, this-week sense: whose life is measurably different because of how I spent my days.
Whose life did I actually touch this week? Not who I meant to serve. Who received something from me — attention, work, care, presence?
Whose life do I want to be touching? Specific people, or specific kinds of people. The ones who, if I served them well, would make me feel that my time here is well spent.
Is the touch I’m making the one I want to be making?
I hope these questions serve you as they are serving me. They are the kind of questions I want to keep with me — the ones that won’t leave me alone, that I’d rather walk with than answer.