Now, if I’ve understood things correctly, I am not the only mother of young children for whom the phrase “Enjoy now, the kids are small for such a short time!” has been the cause of a fit of tearful laughter. A short time?!? Time doesn’t really fly when you’re staying up with a crying baby or when your 3-year-old wants to walk to the bus stop s-l-o-w-l-y every morning. But… now that I’m out of the deep end of the fatigue fog, I realise that that it’s many years more o’clock than before. The people around me have aged (God forbid – me too!), the kids are not toddlers anymore, the school kids I used to know have become adults and the 90s ended more than 20 years ago. So be it: time passes quickly and children grow up just as fast.
Children. They play an important part in why I started to really think about my own working life anew. After I was out of survival mode, I woke up to really think about what it was again I wanted to teach my children about life. There are quite a lot of these things, but at the very least I would like their childhood to be filled with time spent together with family, a wide exploration of the world from different angles, creativity and a full opportunity to grow into the people they are. It dawned on me that these things had been the reality of our family maybe about 30% of the time.
Once I had to think about the direction of my working life when we moved countries anyway, I realised that I simply don’t have the time to end up spending 8 or 9 hours of my day on things that are not in line with those things listed above. I see it not only as a waste of my time, but also of my children’s childhood. And I’m not talking about housewife vs. career mum or how much time each person spends working. No, it’s that I can’t teach them to find their own path if I’m blindly following the wrong one myself. There can’t be enough room for creativity in our home if I don’t make room for it in my own life. I can’t teach them values that I don’t follow myself. And I don’t think that working time is for work and free time for thinking about values. (I use the word “values” even though I basically don’t like it. It takes my mind to something set in stone and ideological. But perhaps on that subject some other time.) No: everything is part of the same whole and life is happening now, every moment, there is no time to waste on the wrong things.
69 Years And 2 Months
…is my current target retirement age in Finland. So I and my peers have decades of working life left. That’s a lot. It would be wise to spend it on something meaningful, so that you don’t spend 30 years doing something beside the point.
Apart from a few exceptions, it is difficult to think of a job that has no purpose. Of course, all work has a meaning for someone. However, it can be frustrating for someone looking for a direction to hear that “Of course your work matters! This office wouldn’t work without the reports you send every week! Parents wouldn’t be able to work unless someone was looking after their children in the meantime! People wouldn’t get paid if there wasn’t a finance department!”
It matters, whether you feel that you are fulfilling your own purpose in a job that also has meaning for other people. There will be a gold lining on reports, a rainbow over a day at daycare and magic dust on pay slips when the work is done by someone who feels they are fulfilling their own purpose in it.
So, You Go And Find Your Purpose Then
Where does a Hausfrau with her hands full packing lunches and doing the laundry go when she is looking for her life purpose? On YouTube, of course! As a big consumer of TED Talks and other motivational videos, I came across Laura Berman Fortgang, a former musical actress, now a career coach. She talks about how a career crisis is always also a mental or spiritual crisis: it is linked to one’s deepest questioning of why I am here in the first place. So it’s not exactly a small detail we’re dealing with when we’re thinking about how to pay for the Nutella on our morning roll.
I digged out some long lost pearls regarding my own purpose with this exercise, which has come up in many sources, but among others in Berman Fortgang’s book Now What? 90 Days to a new life direction (Vibrance Press):
Write your life story from birth to this moment in bullet points. Record both technically significant events (starting school, moving to a new town) and emotionally significant events (being bullied in kindergarten, getting compliments on my piano performance). Next to it, write down how things made you feel: ashamed, proud, etc.
In all its simplicity, this excercise can reveal unconscious patterns. For example, I found that I got into classical music because of the very strong guidance of my parents. Music has been a great gift in my life, but not something I was always naturally interested in. Arts production I chose because it was a reasonable and safe option in the creative field I coveted. When I in addition also thought about the things I liked to do as a child and what was interesting and easy for me at school, I noticed a certain disconnect between those things and the present.
Suddenly I remembered how deeply interested I was in psychology and philosophy, and how easy it was for me to write. I always had something to say about these topics in class. The creation of this blog can be attributed to this observation. Once I became aware of the importance of writing and philosophising, it became an obsession that kept me awake at night. These themes are at least somewhat related to my own life’s work, otherwise I wouldn’t lose sleep over them. So a word of warning: a little digging into your own story can lead to unbridled frenzy.
I can easily see certain themes in my own children and other people – how come is it so easy to forget them when it comes to yourself?
P.S. I sometimes lose sleep over great music too.