Possibilities Newsletter | September 2021

Meaning and Purpose

I've been in several conversations with clients and colleagues recently about purpose. It feels that for many our Year of Languishing is giving rise to a desire to reconnect with meaning in our lives. In those conversations, people often spoke about things 'resonating' which had me wonder - what is resonance, really?

Resonance

In my search I found this great video about the concept of resonance in Physics. The presenter wanted to find a better description of resonance than 'the frequency at which an object likes to vibrate'. Think about circling a wine glass with a damp finger to make it vibrate. It starts to emit a particular note 'sing' at its resonant frequency.

After experimenting by tapping on a Rubens tube to find produce resonance from it, the presenter re-described resonance as:

'getting the timing and frequency just right so that the energy you put into the system adds to the energy that is already there'.

This seems like a good metaphor for our relationship with meaning in our lives. When something inherent within us is tapped at the right time and frequency by the outside world we feel a sense of amplified energy that wants to be expressed. Seeking to express that sense of meaning in our lives through our actions could be called living with purpose. In this way of thinking about it, purpose is not 'discovered' or 'created' but is a co-creation of some specific tendency within me and something in the external world that taps upon it such that I feel called to express something different in my life.

Connecting to ourselves and opening to the world

In my own life, food has always been meaningful. Growing up in England, I watched my Chinese Singaporean mum and aunts go to great lengths to acquire and prepare food celebrating Chinese New Year and Mid Autumn Festival and everything in between. We made pilgrimages to London's Chinatown and brought home Mooncakes, mangoes and, on one memorable occasion, durian! Buying, preparing and eating food together were rituals that brought the country my mother still called 'home' to us ...and brought us together.

Food has played an important role in my own life in different ways. Whether communal cooking at Uni (blue soup, anyone?), cultivating a veggie patch in a small London garden as an antidote to long hours in the office, or hosting traditional English Christmas dinners for my family in Singapore, it is easy for me to see food represented camaraderie, comfort and care to me.

How does that connect me to greater purpose in my work and life? I've certainly never had any desire to be a chef or restauranteur. But what I have noticed in my gradual awakening to the realities of climate and ecological catastrophe is feeling drawn to thinking more deeply about how we grow and eat food and about communities. I haven't felt drawn to working on carbon credits schemes, or projects to clean up the oceans. As worthy as those subjects are, they don't have personal meaning for me which I know would make it harder to sustain my interest in them.

For the last year I have been a community member of an organic farm in which we invest in a season of produce at a time and every week receive a share of what the farm grows. But this month I signed up for a course on how to grow a permaculture garden and to see how the ethics and design principles might be applied elsewhere in order to live more in harmony with Life.

I'm not sure I could say 'food is my passion' - but I have energy and interest for it that can be tapped. Sometimes its just about finding a place to start.