I spend lots of time discussing what it means to ‘live on purpose’, but still – in the scheme of your life – what does it actually mean?

And what does it take to live this way?

A Portrait of Purpose

I have friend that I have known since elementary school, someone with whom I feel an immediate affinity with no matter how long it’s been since we’ve seen or spoken with each other.  She is a sister of my heart, I think.

And my friend, Alannah, always knew that she would be a teacher when she ‘grew up’.  It wasn’t simply the fact that her parents were teachers, she was a teacher…even then.  She was patient and willing to work with others towards their understanding.

Alannah attained her degree and set out, with optimistic purpose, on the road towards fulfilling this dream.  In America, however, teachers are not highly regarded and ’teaching’ is often the last thing you actually do.  After the bureaucratic red-tape, heaps of paperwork, abuse from parents, lack of support from administration, insular relationships with your coworkers, a laughable income - by the time you get around to teaching, there’s almost nothing of what you loved left.

Teachers are the bottom of every barrel.

With a weary heart, Alannah left teaching to get a job.  The job was ok; she liked it and did well, received promotions and pay raises and the like.  But Alannah had little passion for her work and was paid barely enough to cover her expenses, much less pay off the college debt she incurred trying to follow her dream.

Frustrated, she was started to get broken down by the seeming futility of her life; she couldn’t go forward or get ahead.

The Choice of Our Lifetime

This story is a reality for millions of people in this country; people who go through their lives in quiet resignation, wishing for the day they wake up and everything is completely different.  It seems there is no escape, no way off the path they’ve chosen, and today’s disillusionment is tomorrow’s mid-life crisis, rage or desperation at how life has unfolded.

Did Alannah resign herself the reality of living at the razor’s edge of her budget?  Did she surrender herself to the road of infinite futility?  No.  She made the seminal choice of her lifetime.

She couldn’t win with the rules she had and the playbook she was given, so she changed the game.  Instead of striving and failing to achieve ’success’ by the metrics of our society, she created her own way.

Changing the Game

I’m sure you’re dying to know what Alannah did to solve her money problems, how she created a space where she didn’t have to be a slave to the almighty dollar, and what she did to free herself from the futility of a non-progressive existence.  (Oh, and how she fulfilled her passion!)

She became a teacher…in a totally different country.

Not only is she fulfilling her passion, she is traveling the world and experiencing a completely new culture!  While she resides in a country where teachers are esteemed, she is living with almost no expenses!  She can devote her income to eradicating debt, (which can often be the yoke of our existence).

When Alannah let everyone, her family and friends, know that she was doing this, my heart rejoiced.  For the answer to her financial issues was a return to her purpose in the penultimate example of elegant efficiency.

Living Your Purpose

I don’t know if she will return to teaching when, or if, she moves back to the states.  She will, however, be less controlled, less circumscribed in her choices.  She will be free to live her life as she chooses.  Instead of her primary concern being a job, she can make choices based on what will fulfill her soul – not simply what will fill her bank account.

Alannah, like many of us, has multiple gifts and abilities, and a variety of passions.  Having successfully pursued teaching, she may wish to fulfill a more creative passion.  And, luckily for my beloved friend, she can do so with an open heart and an eye towards a future with more opportunity, more options, that she is blinded by the possibilities.

It takes courage to take a step like that into the unknown.  She very well could have hated her choice for the next year.  Only you can know if living an existence on a treadmill of drudgery is worth the risk of changing everything.

Because that’s what it takes to live on purpose.