What the Hardest Seasons Teach Us About What Matters Most
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
– Viktor Frankl
I want to start this week with something I think we often get wrong about purpose.
We treat it like a destination. Something to be found, usually through significant effort and ideally a dramatic moment of clarity. We imagine that purposeful people know something we do not — that they have received some signal about their place in the world that has not yet reached us.
The research suggests otherwise. Purpose, in its most useful form, is not a dramatic discovery.
It is a quiet orientation. A direction of travel. A set of values, held consistently, that guide the small decisions of an ordinary day.
You probably already have it. You may just not be calling it that.
In Positive Discipline, self-management is the skill of acting in alignment with your values even when emotions are running high. Even when you are tired, or provoked, or the day has gone badly and the version of yourself you wanted to be is nowhere to be found.
This is purpose in action.
Not the grand version — not the one that requires a vision board — but the daily, ground-level, quietly heroic version. The choice to respond rather than react. The choice to reconnect after a rupture. The choice to keep showing up for a child who is making it genuinely hard to show up for them.
These choices are expressions of purpose. They are saying, with your behaviour: this is what I am about. This is what I will keep being about even when it is inconvenient.
Finding purpose in an uncertain world
I want to say something specific about this for the world we are living in right now.
Uncertain times have a particular way of destabilising purpose. When the external structures we rely on feel unreliable — political, social, economic, institutional — it is easy for the internal structures to waver too. What’s the point? is a question that becomes louder in the noise.
This is exactly when purpose matters most. Not as a response to the uncertainty — not as a way of solving it or resolving it — but as an anchor. The thing that does not move when everything else does. The clear, quiet knowledge of what you are here to do and who you are here to be, which remains constant regardless of what the news is saying this morning.
Viktor Frankl, who survived conditions that were incomparably worse than anything most of us will face, wrote that those who were able to endure the unendurable were those who had maintained a sense of meaning and purpose. Not because purpose made the suffering less. But because it gave it a context. A why that made the how survivable.
You have a why. Even if you have not named it recently.
How to find your way back to purpose?
A simple exercise. Not grand. Five minutes.
Sit with this question: why did I choose this work — teaching, parenting, caring for children — and what did I hope it would be?
Not what you were told it would be. Not what the job description said. What you hoped for, deep down, when you began.
Then ask: where do I see traces of that hope still alive in my daily work? However small.
Most people find, when they do this honestly, that the original purpose has not gone. It has been buried under exhaustion and administration and the weight of things that never got done.
But it is there. And naming it — returning to it, even briefly — has the effect that the research describes: it gives strength and confidence that carries you through the difficult days.
This is not toxic positivity. This is not pretending the hard things are not hard. It is choosing to hold the meaning of the work alongside the difficulty of it, rather than allowing the difficulty to swallow the meaning whole.
We have spent four Tuesdays asking what it means to flourish inside a difficult world.
And what I hope you are taking from this month is not a programme or a set of steps. It is something simpler.
That flourishing is available to you. Now. In the life you are actually living. Through connection, through awareness, through the invisible significance of your daily contribution, and through the quiet, consistent orientation of purpose.
Spring is still here outside the window. Something is still blooming. And so, even on the hard days, are you.
Thank you for April. I will see you in May. 🌿
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