Purpose = Calling + Cause + Passion + Desire
This blog post was written by Jim Ewing in early 2014, and one of the final pieces he left us. It was the opening section of a new introduction to the Impacto map, and is an enticing glimpse into what might have followed…
We think that this stands as well on its own as it does alongside the other materials on Impacto. Enjoy!
Exploring Purpose means exploring this equation to find what is active in the client’s mind. It is also a chance to widen their sense of what their Purposes actually are made of. Mine is hardly the only model of this, but it is enough to broaden the conversation and get at an authentic, nuanced and compelling Purpose.
Calling: the top of the list
My daughter Jennifer is surely called to be an actor and, I believe, in time, a director and producer. From age five, she has not wavered – the various other diversions of her life simply cannot compete.
My Irish Catholic family hoped beyond hope that I had a calling to be a priest. Not to be, though I did show a temperament for some of the pastoral work of the priesthood in my high school and college years as I studied science and engineering.
Our calling, if we recognize it, will seem like something coming from afar, as it emerges from our Extended Self - the real connection we have to all of life without boundaries of skin and bone. If we have opened to the uncertainty, randomness and surprise of the Extended Self, a direct experience of the Real World, as opposed to the rational storymaking world, our calling will emerge over time or even in a flash.
We will have a sense of it and it will not seem alien or other worldly. Rather, it will be genuinely our work - life giving, confirming, challenging, risky, surprising, confabulating, enlivening and worth the trouble. We may have a calling we just don’t take on in this life. Or we may think we have a calling or two or five. While it may seem like spinning our wheels working through apparently false callings, that work will, in time, open the doorway to our Extended Self, to reveal the essential calling which beckons us, like a Pied Piper, to enliven the every ‘right now’ of our lifetime.
Cause: Callings in Action
Many people can share the same cause in their own way. When cathedrals were built in Europe, artisans were born and died without experiencing the beginning or end of the project. Yet, they seemed to passionately live out a cause - perhaps the glory of God, the evolution and mastery of the craft of stone masonry, the elevation of their family line to the top of the craft for generations ahead, or just inspired to be part of making the coolest, most expensive, advanced and expansive structures in their world in their time. These were collective causes.
Everyone has a cause of some sort - to have great children, to make the flowers on the Sunday altar absolutely the best, to push the art of the Margarita beyond the status quo, to make a dent in the universe, or what have you. I used to think a cause was a lifelong thing, but I’m not so sure now. In my own life I recognize a variety of causes which coexist in me and come and go. The cause to bring transformational fitness and insight to those I meet. The cause to spare my children from my origin family’s racism, descrimination, and forced adherence to trivial, man-made rules of formal, prideful religion. The cause to keep violence out of my marriage.
As you have no doubt grasped, the causes I’ve taken up are far bigger than me. Having good men to be wise, non-violent and enduring influences for their spouses, kids and grandkids is a huge need in our culture.
The entire American culture is struggling with racism, discrimination and the poison of ignorance promulgated by much of fundamental organized religions, America’s corrupted corporatocracy and securitocracy, and heaven help us, the cynical, manipulative, destructive and demeaning minds at Fox News.
These are generational and widely shared causes at the least. My generation was born into the present and post WWII world without the original sin of the Holocaust. 1939 for me. A great year for Hollywood. Not so great for Europe.
The great majority of us will exit the planet before the American Civil War, scientific reason as a foundation for understanding more of the universe, profit as all there is, the supremacy of the gilded one percent, how 9/11 actually happened and who did it, and the conceits of all the rah rah around the American Empire as first in the world are finally put to rest (do we really need American flags bigger than an American football field? Somebody is working on it. Maybe we’ll have to cover the whole stadium full of people before we get over ourselves).
Getting free of these outworn ideas which are quite obviously on the wrong side of history, is both a personal cause for me for my family and those I meet, as well as my bit for the cultural cause.
Like the cathedral builders, these causes pass on over generations. It took the Kennedy and Johnson years with all their violence, assassinations, the Viet Nam debacle, and way too many ugly Americans making trouble in the world to make societal laws with teeth. From George Wallace fanboys, to ancient, entrenched congressional representatives and lobbyists down to me, our generation has to die off so the younger ones can make the world their way with their generosity for skin color, language, sexual preferences and recreational and medical use of natural drugs.
It is heartwarming to witness this in daughter Jennifer’s twenty and thirty something crowd. And in our teenage grand girls in Salt Lake in spite of the rule bound, old white male controlled, diversity-averse, dominant religion in the state of Utah. I more than admire and celebrate the daily work our children are doing to set their kids free of old blinders.
An hour listening to David and Lisa and the girls, contrasted with thirty some years of listening to my now departed parents on nearly any subject reveals how far, at least in our family, we have come.
Passion: the Juice
Guide books to follow your heart, find your passion, live your dream, etc., must collectively take up thousands of miles of shelf space in bookstores the world over. They appear to keep coming, happily repeating themselves at the concept level. Pretty much rearrangements of the deck chairs on the good ship Lollipop. Not that they are wrong. Just that finding your hearts delight for work must be a very tempting target to write about and get published.
Is ‘passion’ just another word for ‘calling’ or ‘cause’?’ I don’t think so. A calling or cause may or may not arrive in us with any passion, or maybe with a passion to run away, if they seem way beyond our powers, or contrary to the rational cover story we tell of who we are.
Passion is an emotional state - our physical body is moved to act, not from rational choice, but from kinesthetic, emotive forces, rarely if ever accessible to rational thinking. Bringing the calling and cause of our Purpose to action in the world requires passionate body centered energy which springs, not from thinking about it - exhorting our self ad nauseum through endlessly repeating affirmations, but from our Extended Mind’s connection with everything out there, beyond our physical body of bone, skin and wetware.
I volunteered and was mentored at the Center for the Healing Arts in West Los Angeles, in the late 70s. The facility was placed right under the six lanes of the 405 Interstate highway which carried the majority of the north/south traffic around the deepest, darkest center of LA and connected beyond the mountains with the main road north to Seattle and Canada. It was a noisy, pounding, in our face and ears reality every hour of every day. Hal Stone, the director told us that the placement was purposeful.
The highway produced the expenditure of vast energy – sonic and otherwise. Our job, among others, was to transmute that energy into our healing - an exercise in not wasting any heat we could apply. This was a huge challenge. Up to that instruction we were all fighting to keep the highway’s onslaught out of our conciousness so we could concentrate on our healing work. Now we were to accept it right into the middle of that work. As so often with Hal, it was a good practice to struggle with. Many years later I did an apparently miraculous healing of a woman’s back in the pew in front of me during a Paul Winter Consort concert - well she thought it was miraculous. It wasn’t truck and motorcycle sounds - the Consort’s music is transformative anyway. I enjoyed the concert and did the work. Damned if it didn’t so some real good for both of us.
Callings and causes can be described in rational language. We know that a rational description of anything is a mere story in our head and holds no guarantee that what we are describing is real, much less actively at work in the world.
That said the rational is not to be dismissed. We rely on our rational minds to integrate calling, cause and passion with the outer physical world as we find it - linking our passionate drive to activity which serves ourselves and our wider community, if not the world, through our Extended Mind which is totally connected at unity with everyone and everything else.
Desire: The basics
Sometimes we just need to enroll others into dining at that Moroccan-Vegan-Thai-Northwest-Fusion eatery we have been drooling for all day.
This is not the province of callings or causes or passions. Well, passions maybe, depending on how complete a foodie adventurer we aspire to be. But whether we wind up at Mr. Morocco on Phinney Ridge or not, the outcome is hardly an earth shattering issue in our lives (I’m setting aside food critics who have publication deadlines, the province of a calling, a cause, and enlivening passion and a logical fit in the world for our insights to be expressed as creatively and transformationally as possible).
Many times I’ve completed a workable Impacto story in my head just minutes before inviting the others. I like trying new places, so my desires run to that fondness. They also run to dining with others. Therefore, the extent of my notes in the Purpose domain will include two lines: explore a new place, with a few good friends to share it.
To illustrate how such a simple, desire-driven Impacto will look, I’ll add the other domains in here as a teaser:
Urgency: equally easy - it’s approaching dinner time, I’m hungry, you must be too, and we have to eat somewhere - Fat Smitty’s burger palace only satisfies for so long. We have a chance to explore something new together.
Destination: even easier - we all turn up at Mr. Morocco at seven pm and each order different things so we can explore a majority of their menu in a family style.
Success Path: get in the cars, catch a cab, take a hike, steal a bike, get on your shiny bright amazo one wheeled Segway cycle or run for the Metro and make the journey.
Commitments: I’ll be there no matter what. I’m committed to providing the libations before and during our dinner together - the booze is on me. I truly want you to commit to join me for this evening’s discovery. It ain’t forever. Just for tonight since my generous booze appropriations will not stand more of this until a couple of paychecks in the future.
It takes way longer to type this out than to think it up and just say it.
None of this is as simple as I’ve made it look. I’m calling desire an infatuation with a temporary objective. However, people have intense, enduring desires for years. The question is, do these rise to the level of passion driven calling or cause. Ascertaining these distinctions is the province of the conversation. If the client experiences desire as passion filled then desire may be the word to use instead of any of the others.
As I’ve said before, call it “peanut butter” if that’s what resonates with the client.
I repeat the equation at the top: Purpose = Calling + Cause + Passion + Desire
I would not let the conversation for Purpose go without checking into these four.
