đ¸ ikigai çăç˛ć is a reason for being, your purpose in life â from the Japanese iki çă meaning life and gai ç˛ć meaning worth đ¸
It was so very sad to hear of Dollyâs passing this week, what an extraordinary woman she was.
Itâs a different shade of grief you feel for someone famous, and the fact that she had a somewhat reasonable innings as they say, makes it a little easier to bear. So my thoughts quickly turned to what it was that made her so loved and admired⌠it almost goes without saying that she was a huge talent, she also had a bloody shrewd head on her shoulders⌠but it was her kindness, her sense of humour and joy⌠and her strength of vision of herself and how she could effect change in this world via the sustained energy of her light, that made her such a hero to me.
My sadness didnât need to be hurried away because beautiful rhinestone sparkly light arrived all by itself⌠in all the gorgeous posts and tributes with SO much evidence of Dollyâs goodness appearing everywhere. A song, a story of generosity, a flash of pink, a reminder of somebody who had felt braver or more themselves because she had been so gloriously herself first.
When a particularly sparkly person leaves our mortal plane, it makes me see with fresh eyes how widely they scattered that light, and consider how I can further their mission too.
I found the version of âLight of a Clear Blue Morningâ that Dolly released in January for her eightieth birthday, with Lainey Wilson, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah and Reba McEntire, which I knew I had to feature as my soundtrack song today. It gathers voices and rises into a joyous celebration. It sounded to me like hope growing stronger because more people have joined the song.
And it arrived just as I was once again thinking about problems.
The problem with problems
As I have been working on my 12 Favourite Problems spread in my new bullet journal, it occurred to me that the word problem can sound so negative, and Iâm someone who prides herself in trying to see positives!!⌠but these are not really supposed to be twelve reasons to lie awake at night over or to make your life more problematic. They are supposed to be a more conscious and controlled awareness of the enduring questions that catch our curiosity and concern⌠indicators of what matters to us that can therefore steer our sense of purpose.
What makes work worth doing? How can technology make us more human rather than less? How can I use my particular combination of experience, curiosity and voice to leave something better than I found it? Our favourite problems reveal something about our purpose because they show us where our attention keeps returning, and where what we love, what we know and what the world needs might meet.
Purpose can feel warm and glowing. It can also feel like a downer if we arenât careful, drawing our eyes towards unfairness, confusion, suffering or wasted possibility and make us wonder whether we could ever really make a difference (always yes IMHO).
As I work through my evolving thoughts on these topics in my journal, and as I am learning to process the sadness I was already feeling, I realised I had created a thoughtful map of everything that needed attention, lots of negatives of our world, without really drawing any of the places I hoped those questions might lead, or indeed pointing out the many positives.
My problems can show me what I care about changing, but itâs so very important to build a picture of what we want to see instead too.
Bad is very good at getting our attention
A review of psychological research was given the wonderfully blunt title Bad Is Stronger Than Good. Its authors found that negative events, feedback and impressions often affect us more powerfully than positive equivalents.
This is not a personal failing. The strange noise in the car and the alarming headline seem more urgent than the many things continuing to function perfectly well. Noticing danger has its uses. But useful instincts can still give us an incomplete picture. If we only record what is broken or missing, purpose can begin to feel like permanent emergency work. We repair, resist and prevent, but rarely imagine, nurture or create.
Even hopeful projects can become organised around what we oppose. We know what we want less of, yet struggle to describe a future we would actually like to inhabit.
Fear may help us apply the brakes but it doesnât help choose our destination.
Purpose needs a picture painting
This is the glorious counterpoint I now want beside my twelve favourite problems. A fresh spread titled 12 Favourite Possibilities.
Possibilities are glimmers of the goodness I want to move towards, protect or help grow. Iâm consciously avoiding forced positive reframes, exhausting goals or pressure to manifest a flawless life through sufficiently sparkly thoughts.
What if technology increased peopleâs confidence without diminishing their agency? What if the Isle of Man could be ambitious about innovation while remaining unmistakably human and kind? Some possibilities belong to a future we have not made yet. Others are already here, waiting to be noticed.
They are present when a teacher watches understanding replace fear on somebodyâs face. When a person with influence holds a door open for someone else. When friends can still find something to laugh about during an unbearable week. When I walk beside the sea with Henry and remember that being alive is SO not a productivity contest. They are present in gloriously sparkly people too. The ones whose kindness is not timid, whose joy is not trivial and whose success illuminates very different paths we could travel.
Perhaps purpose asks for two kinds of noticing⌠the place where we could fix something and the goodness we want to be near.
Joy is not a distraction from the work
In experiments by psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Christine Branigan, positive emotions such as amusement and contentment were associated with a broader scope of attention and a wider range of imagined actions. Joy did not make people less able to see reality, it helped them see more of it.
This is so so important because joy is sometimes treated as the reward we may enjoy once all the serious problems have been solved. Given the current state of the serious problems, this seems like an excellent way to postpone joy indefinitely. For work to be good and worth doing, it doesnât also have to be serious and stuffy! Positive possibilities pull their weight, they remind us why we care enough to continue and help us imagine more than one route forwards.
The psychologist C. R. Snyder described hope as involving both pathways towards a desired future and a sense that we can act along them. Hope needs somewhere to go and some idea of how we might travel. Certainty that everything will be fine appears nowhere in the definition, which is rather a relief *grin*.
Hope is refusing to let everything that is wrong become the whole picture.
Twelve favourite possibilities
My new spread will not attempt to solve each favourite problem neatly on the opposite page. Life rarely offers such cooperative symmetry. Instead, I want to build twelve scenes that make an even better future state feel doable.
For each one, I will ask three questions.
What is the picture? What would this possibility look and feel like on an ordinary day?
Where is the spark? Who or what already shows me that some fragment of it is possible?
What is the movement? What small action would take me closer to it or help it become more common?
The ordinary day specificity is important, breaking it down into something manageable. âA kinder worldâ is difficult to picture. A meeting in which the least powerful person can ask the uncomfortable question without being punished is a scene. A beginner leaving an AI workshop feeling capable rather than left behind is a scene. Telling a sparkly person what their light has meant while they are still here to hear it is a scene.
This gives me a new question to consider beside every favourite problem.
What good thing is this problem preventing, and where can I already see a fragment of the better alternative?
The answer may reveal an organisation to support, a person to learn from or a small experiment worth trying. Purposeful pathways move us closer to what makes us feel most alive.
The light we pass along
Dolly wrote âLight of a Clear Blue Morningâ in 1976, during a season when she was searching for hope, and called it her song of deliverance. Fifty years later she invited other women to add their voices, released it as an eightieth birthday gift to the rest of us and gave the proceeds to childrenâs cancer research. Hope can travel beyond its original moment, gathering new people and new meaning as it goes.
That may be what moved me most this week. Dollyâs light travelled⌠it helped other people sing, create, give, laugh, read, dream, dress magnificently and become less apologetic about taking up space. Annaâs did too, itâs the most common thing people have said to me over these last few weeks, that she just had the most fabulous energy about her that really shone and made you feel special and lit you up too. There is only one Dolly Parton and Anna Goldsmith, of course. The rest of us will have to find our own particular kind of sparkle.
My twelve favourite problems still matter. They tell me where my concern lives and where my experience might be useful. I will keep allowing them to shape the work I choose⌠but they are not the whole picture.
I also want to remember the people who shine, the places where something kinder is already being attempted and the small pieces of a better future growing between the cracks.
Perhaps purpose needs both pages. One for what we cannot ignore and one for what we refuse to stop believing is possible.
The world contains pain, injustice and problems worth giving ourselves to⌠but the world is also full of light.
We should look at it with new eyes, tell people when we see it shining through them⌠and whenever we can try to nudge more positive than negative.
Now over to you⌠who is a sparkly person in your life, living or loved and lost, and what song instantly brings their light to mind? Share it below (a link if you can find one, Iâd love a playlist of pure sparkle by Sunday) ⌠journalers, a photo of your possibilities spread would make my whole week too⌠*Kisses on your beautiful faces till you squeak*
Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx
PS - Bullet Journal prompt
Create a new spread for favourite possibilities. Turn to a fresh page and write 12 Favourite Possibilities at the top. Include possibilities you hope to create and goodness that already deserves more attention. Reflect on the positives that matter the most and feel free to use the suggested questions from this essay in your journals to expand out your purpose pathways.
PPS - An AI prompt to help you notice the light;
âI am going to share some problems, questions or concerns I care about. Help me explore the positive possibilities they could point towards. For each one, ask what I hope might exist instead, where I may already have seen a small example of it, and what gentle action could move me closer. Do not turn my answers into forced positivity, grand goals or a productivity plan. Help me notice what I value, what gives me grounded hope and what I may want to protect, join or help grow in a mission to make my corner of the world a slightly sparklier place. Ask me questions rather than inventing the answers for me.â
PPPS The soundtrack. âLight of a Clear Blue Morningâ by Dolly Parton, featuring Lainey Wilson, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah and Reba McEntire. A gorgeous song that starts with one clear voice, and ends in glorious chorus.