Open Spaces

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

As my friend and I sat sipping our coffee across the table from each other, I shared some stories from my career-driven past. He looked at me and asked, “What is your purpose now?”

Eight years into retirement and having repeatedly asked myself that same question, I certainly should have had the answer. Yet I was speechless as I mentally scrambled around for something that sounded more meaningful than “walking the dog and meet-ups with friends.” I managed some kind of response before moving the conversation in a different direction.

I was still turning the troubling question over in my mind a few days later when I read Suzy Walker’s Heart Leap post, A Wanderful Walk. In it, she describes using David Pearl’s “wanderful walk” practice of asking yourself a question before setting off on a walk in which you look for answers in the details of what you see.

Fanciful, perhaps. But I was intrigued enough to give it a try. As Brody wagged his entire body while I put on his harness, I asked myself my “wanderful” question: “What is my purpose now?”

With Brody’s keen nose as our GPS, we stepped outside into a glorious early afternoon. The air had that just-after-a-rain freshness following two days of rain. The spring flowers were bursting with color under a brilliant blue sky dotted with huge puffy white clouds. I took in all that beauty, certain we’d come across some detail leading me towards an answer.

Yet thirty minutes into our walk, after wandering through neighborhoods and green spaces, I still had no answers to my question. Until Brody paused in front of this sign:

Despite having passed this sign on countless walks, on that day the words “Open Space” not only jumped out at me, but also, in my mind, became “Open Spaces.” I immediately thought of something one of my writing instructors often told us: “Hold your story loosely.” Rather than hold tight to a pre-conceived storyline, let the story surprise us with new people and unexpected events.

Open spaces. Holding my story loosely.

The phrases kept rolling through my mind as if seeking a place to land while Brody tugged me forward. We walked around the corner, then up a short block to a park we walk through every day.

As the park came into view, what I saw was an open space inviting us in.

As Brody and I walked through the park, I remembered the times when the unexpected loss of loved ones or the end of defining roles blew apart the script I’d carefully constructed for my life. I found myself in open spaces in which I couldn’t begin to imagine the future, and the past was too painful to revisit.

Feeling unmoored and utterly powerless, I had done the only thing I could think of—I held my future loosely. I looked no further than where I stood each moment, trusting that my life story would unfold in its own way and time.

Eventually those individual moments held the people, relationships, and experiences that became the bridge to the next, often most rewarding, chapters of my life.

A bridge on the other side of the open space park.

While I had been berating myself for no longer having a career-driven purpose, perhaps I’d been living my purpose in a way that Toni Feldstein in The Joy of the Purposeless Life described as being “who we are at this very moment and what we are doing right now.”

Feldstein goes on to explain that there are some people who know from a young age what they want to do and remain committed to that pursuit throughout their lives.

Whereas “The rest of us are beating to a different drum, the human life drum. Our purpose may not look like anything special or distinct to the outside eye, however, it is no less powerful and worth living. … [Our purpose] is so close to us, woven into our daily lives, that we usually miss it altogether because we are busy looking elsewhere, again, for the big one.”

Not only had I been looking elsewhere, but I’d also been looking back. Believing my purpose now needed to be as concrete and visible to others as my career had been. I no longer believe that. Yet if my friend asked me again what my purpose is, I’d still hesitate. But I think I’d say: I’m in an open space of discovery, holding my story loosely.

What is your purpose now?