I do not need to have every step mapped out to move forward with purpose. The work I do today, however small, is guided by what matters most to me.

“Find your purpose” is bad advice. I’m not hedging on that. The phrase implies a single fixed object buried somewhere in your psyche, waiting to be excavated like an artifact, and once you dig it up you’ll finally know what to do with your days. I believed this for years and it kept me stuck, because every time I tried to locate the one shining thing I was “meant” for, I came up empty and concluded the problem was me. The instruction to find your purpose treats purpose as a noun when it functions much better as an adverb: not a destination you arrive at but a quality that can color even unremarkable action.

What changed my mind was noticing what actually happened on days I felt purposeful versus days I didn’t. The purposeful days were rarely the ones with a grand plan. They were days I answered an email carefully, or stayed an extra ten minutes with a student who was struggling, or made a choice about how to spend an hour instead of drifting through it. None of those actions pointed toward a single capital-P Purpose. They pointed toward something more like orientation: a felt sense of what mattered, applied to whatever was in front of me. The days that felt hollow, meanwhile, often had plenty of productivity in them. I checked boxes. I moved fast. But the motion was untethered from anything I cared about, and speed without orientation is just blur.

Pema Chödrön talks about groundlessness as something to practice with rather than escape from, and I think purpose lives in that same neighborhood. When the ground is uncertain (you don’t know where your career is heading, or your relationship is shifting, or the project you poured yourself into just fell apart) the temptation is to freeze until a clear map appears. But purpose doesn’t require a map. It requires you to know, roughly, what direction you’re facing. And “roughly” is the operative word. You can be oriented toward honesty, toward care, toward craft, toward service, and take one step in that direction without seeing the second step at all. That single step is not a compromise or a placeholder for the real work you’ll do once you figure things out. It is the real work.

I want to be honest about the discomfort of this, though. Living without the map means living with a low hum of not-knowing, and that hum can get loud. Last spring I spent weeks unable to articulate why a particular commitment still mattered to me even though the circumstances around it had completely changed. I couldn’t defend the choice logically. I just kept showing up, and the showing up felt like walking through fog: each step fine, the larger shape invisible. It would be dishonest to tell you the fog lifted dramatically. It thinned. Slowly. And the thinning came not from figuring out a grand justification but from accumulating enough small, care-driven actions that the pattern they made became visible in hindsight.

Purpose seen this way is quieter and less photogenic than the version sold in commencement speeches. It doesn’t thunder into the room. It’s closer to the way your hand, reaching for a glass of water, already knows which direction to move before your conscious mind finishes the thought. You reach because you’re thirsty. You act because something matters. The clarity is in the reaching, not in a plan you drew up beforehand.