A friend shared an interesting article this week. It spoke about how many of us are ‘multi-passionate people’ and how challenging it is for some of us to define our “purpose” in life (or whether we should even attempt to define our purpose). I could really resonate with that, as I have never felt that I fit within any identifiable ‘box’. Instead, I feel so blessed that I am both excited and passionate about so many different things that my life is full, sometimes over-flowingly so, with things that absorb my interest and I am so very grateful for that. Not always a good thing as I have to pin myself down and try to stay focused on something before being drawn to the next exciting thing that captures my heart and fills it with joy: family, animals, health, farming, soil, opera, yoga, osteopathy, friends, personal development, psychology, to name just a few. Although writing this blog has helped me with staying more focused as I now spend time combing through and making sense of my, frequently scattered, knotted, thoughts.

Accepting ourselves as multi-passionate, so the article explained, allows us to carry several ’threads’ of purpose throughout our lives, rather than having the pressure of trying to find one, single purpose, as though that is a static, destination stop at which you can disembark from the train of life. A bit like enlightenment. That too gives the impression that it is a place where you arrive at if you have been good enough, meditated enough and eaten purely enough to be allowed to get off the train here. This just isn’t the reality of either purpose or enlightenment, which are both, as I see them, evolving and moving depths of consciousness as we seek to work on or develop certain aspects of ourselves, as they change and morph over time. What was absolutely certain at one period of our lives, can dramatically change when we are in a different phase of life and viewing things from a different perspective.

Thinking about my purpose in this way has made me feel free to accept the many colourful threads that weave themselves intricately though my life and create an individual and unique, colourful cloth. That each of us has our own cloth woven by our multi-passions; each one exquisitely beautiful and unique to us. No one else can make a cloth like ours and equally, we cannot create one like anyone else’s. Just like an antique, hand knotted, persian carpet; each one is a masterpiece, hand crafted diligently over a long time. They may have similarities to others, but no two are exactly alike and the beauty is within that fact. We must celebrate this individualism and encourage ourselves, and our children, to see all the experiences we have and the ever-changing passions that we carry, are what go in to create our whole, complex woven cloth that gleams with our own pattern of technicolour threads.

Like all healthy habitats, celebrating this allows us to become a mosaic rather than a monoculture and we can then adapt and shift as the world around us changes. It allows us to weave our threads with others to create an intricate but complex web of connection that has greater resilience and strength. It also allows us to drop a thread or two as others can pick up and weave alongside us until we feel able to pick them back up again, and we can do the same for them too. If our threads get into a tangled knot, we may be able to share it until the pattern becomes clear again. The mosaic is complex, but if we allow our purpose to be more than one thing, to embrace our own complexity and our multiple passions, our cloth can become a glorious, complicated tapestry which can dance and adapt as the world changes, and we can change and adapt alongside her as she does.