A Method for Aligning Purpose and Practice

If you see your work as a commitment to benefitting the world, how do you continue to summon and affirm that commitment?

Like you, most days I work. From early on, I've wanted the work I do to be purposeful to me and positive for the world. As I've gotten older, my relationship with life has grown more passionate, more complex, and more mysterious, while my commitment to a life of positive impact has grown more resolute. I found myself wanting clearer ways to connect these feelings with the motions of my daily activities. What follows is a method I assembled to foster this coherence, not just as ideas or words, but as living connections in mind and heart.

I wanted an actual ritual or meditation I could perform. I call this my alignment, and I try to do it at the start and end of my work days. 

I do this in a number of ways. It’s a process composed of six layers, or lenses, each inviting different experiences of oneself in the world.

– 1) Root (sensing our connection with life and existence)

– 2) Commitment (recalling who we choose to be)

– 3) Foresight (seeking to make sense of where we came from and where the world is going)

– 4) Dream (invoking what positive realities are possible)

– 5) Plan (affirming how we will make a contribution)

– 6) Practice (arriving into the present)

Sometimes I write out my reflections to these prompts on the page or screen, but my preferred way is more contemplative, sitting on a chair or a meditation cushion on the floor, eyes lowered, allowing myself to enter each section intellectually, conceptually, emotionally, and bodily. I dwell in each layer, absorbing until I’ve felt it gain gravity in my consciousness. This can take five minutes, but I’ve done it for up to an hour. Sometimes I go through the six checkpoints on the train ride in the morning. I’ve even done a few weekends where I spend whole days going deep into each of the six layers, thinking and writing at length. 

But my basic implementation is to start and end my work day with five or ten minutes of this. Here is how I think of the six lenses:

1 – Root

On the ground level we visit our contact point with existence. This place is as marvelous as life itself and language quickly fails us, giving way to panoramic silence. I encounter amazement at simply being here on a little planet drenched in life in an unfathomably deep universe.

And here’s me, a thin thread in a living fabric, a momentary musician in the grandest symphony. I remember that this is less about holding and more about letting go; less about solving and more about surrendering. Here, my small self must know by not knowing. I can perceive a mysterious perfection as I sit in oneness with things as they are. I can soften my stories about being a separate self. Sometimes I open my ears and listen to the chorus of human life across the world, smell the wet soil of a jungle, or watch our blue marble turn in the breathless depth of space. I try to sit here at the root level until I feel its permeating aliveness and awe.

This embrace of transcendence is not the property of any theology or theory; indeed, labels are mostly distractions. It’s an acknowledgement of reality and everything it contains, contradictions and all. If you have practices that bring you here then you already know. If not, consider seeking doorways to it. I’m confident that transcendence is available and learnable. I recently came across this line of Albert Einstein’s: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” I hope that in everything I do there is a remembrance of the mysterious. 

2 – Commitment

Next we visit our basic commitments as to how we want to be, the foundational promises that inform our values and actions, or maybe it’s just a recollection of who we want to be today. We don’t yet need to focus on specific causes or plans; this is about a central resolution as to how we want to live. 

For me this primarily means a commitment to a life of positive effect. Simple as that. I want to be a good friend to those close to me, and I want to contribute to a positive future for all. I have spiritual precepts that offer shape to this, but the underlying root needs no formal protocols. You likely have creeds, commitments, vows, covenants, codes, or philosophies that anchor your values. This is a place to honor and refresh these. 

As we sit in this view we don't need to know all the answers. And we don't need to worry if we're worthy or up to the task. It is everyone's right to care for and contribute to the greater good, in their own way. No doubts or judgements should diminish the significance of committing to being an agent of good.

I trust that if I commit to this each day, my life will go in that direction. This commitment is also a powerful way to honor the perfectly amazing reality we celebrated a moment ago, a way of saying thank you for all of this. 

3 – Foresight

Now to get more technical as we build a forecast of the future. Here we observe the world around us and guess, as best we can, what is coming. Before we can imagine the world we want, we predict where this one is going. Here we are students of the future trying to orient ourselves in a complex world.

Sometimes I begin by scrolling back in time and flying through history until now: 13.8 billion years since the big bang, 4.6 billion since the formation of Earth, 3.5 billion since simple cells, 1 billion since multicellular life, hunter gatherers arrive some 1.5 million years ago, agriculture some 10,000 years ago, a human population of 1 billion in 1800, 4 billion when I was born in 1980, the 8-plus billion of us today...

Then I look at the world now: ecological systems, cultures, nations, economies, religions, technologies, political factions, power conflicts, social movements... I try to step out of the news and my narratives and see the planet from above at this moment in our species’ story. 

Then I push for a picture of what happens next. Next year, the year after that, five years out. Then I try for ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred. I can’t know, but I can challenge myself to squint. Superforecasters know that the best predictions often come from combining many diverse sources of information and being willing to update as we receive new material.

This lens might produce clear predictions (try making weighted guesses of what will happen this year, predict some elections or market behavior, then check it in three months), or it might be more about exercising this way of thinking and opening our curiosity about how the future will form. It certainly affirms my commitment to studying important issues as deeply as I can. 

I’ve also found it’s helpful to notice when foresight becomes cloudier (political chaos and fast-moving technology make predictions harder) – this too is valuable feedback.

Taking the time to build a theory of the future lets us tread into areas we might not otherwise go, where others may not be going. We can build a scaffolding of evidence and independent thought. Equipped with this, we can carry out seemingly small actions that are tied to larger structures. It can also show us where we want to place our dreams.

4 – Dream

At the dream layer we move past what is probable to what could be possible. We exercise the ability to imagine brilliantly positive futures. What if, at least once a day, we picture things going beautifully?

It is here that we remind ourselves that indeed we must be willing to dream of wonderful things if we want them to arrive. This dreaming is one of the most consequential and moving forces of humanity. Dreams are often at the heart of great leadership. Throughout time, people have set their hearts and minds to things that were convincingly impossible. But impossible is negotiable. Nothing is by definition intractable.

This is not a matter of telling ourselves everything will be okay. It is an act of radical creativity that keeps the aperture of hope open. Dreaming is not meek. Daring to dream means the courage to be boldly sincere. Dreams are fragile and, especially when they are young, can shrink in the cold wind of ridicule or wither in the long shadow of present conditions. 

Our dream doesn't need to be unique or have any special genius. What it needs to be is brave, pushing past incremental progress to new fields of possibility. Eradicating smallpox is a dream realized. So is taking the death sentence out of HIV infection and cutting world poverty in half. There will never be universal agreement on what a worthy dream is: we live in a world of contradictory dreams, and we always will. 

This is an invitation to think it, but also to really feel it, see it, live it for a moment. What is it like to walk through that peaceful neighborhood? To study that graph of economic prosperity or falling mortality? To read the article on the increasing rarity of wars, terrorism, or child abuse? These days I do a lot of visualizing humans in safe and uplifting coexistence with incredibly powerful technology. 

It’s interesting to consider that some of the greatest realized dreams might not make headlines at all. “No global pandemic in the past ten years.” If you’re a dream worker you might be celebrated as a hero, but maybe not – maybe especially if you’re really good at your job! 

As we explore our dreams we see that a dream is bigger than any campaign, movement, organization, or leader. Finding ways to contribute to a dream can be the work of a lifetime and may involve much searching, trying, and frustration. If it’s truly big it will probably outlive you, maybe by many generations. How patient can we be in our contributions?

5 – Plan

The next checkpoint is to look at the plan we’re working from. What am I trying to do with my efforts? What's my job? What am I building? Where can I find resources for this? Who else believes what I believe? How am I moving in the direction of a meaningful dream?

Here we are reminded that a plan can mean committing to chip away at one manageable pixel of the issues we care about. We choose our leverage area, informed by the big picture, but right-sized to our abilities and willingness to contribute.

Sometimes this means just looking down at the path I’m walking on and acknowledging that this is my plan right now. Stick with the plan: get through this semester, finish this project, raise this money... Sometimes it comes as a reminder that I need a clearer plan, or that the next chapter needs designing. And sometimes it’s clear that my best plan is to ask good questions of the world and invite new opportunities. I think we’re always carrying out some kind of plan – the question is if this is the one we want to be doing. 

6 – Practice 

The final step in this ceremony is the most intimate and urgent of them: landing here in this moment, just as it is. Theory is vapor, we don’t live in theory. Life is now. 

So we land into our bodies, here in our seat, where we stand and walk, where we live and breathe. I call this practice, but a clearer word might be presence, mindfulness, or simply being. It is a recognition that we live here, in the practice of everyday life, in the vividness of exactly this. This is not practice for something to come. It is the practice of being you, right where you are.

It may be that to find this presence we want to craft specific practices to help us, methods for reducing distractions and stress, making time for focused thinking, exercising deep listening, activating the body, connecting the breath. These can support you in present-moment awareness.

The importance of this layer is that it launches us into motion. It brings the other work to life, over and over, making it part of daily momentum – not merely a series of writing assignments or thought experiments. This is the practice of throwing ourselves into the hard work of the big projects, but it’s also making the coffee, having this next conversation, saying the next word that comes out of my mouth. Face to face with others, am I aware, awake, kind? This might take the most real courage. But like any practice, we pour ourselves into it again and again.

If this alignment practice is being used to start our day, this final layer sets us in motion, having brought these different horizons of ourselves to the table. We’ve stood before the great expanse, remembered our commitments, mapped the world as it is, envisioned a world as it could be, and rolled out the map we’re following. Now we emerge to take one step forward, then the next. We put one word forth, then the next. One breath, then the next. 

When I’m done I open my eyes and move forward with my morning or evening.

✦ ✦ ✦

Thank you for reading this. I’d really like to hear what you think of it. If you’ve found it interesting, I suggest you close your eyes and sit with each section until you can feel something take shape. I hope these containers are generous enough that you could place in them what is most meaningful and useful to you. If you find your own variations on the themes, I’d love to hear about it. 

No matter what, may you find meaning and courage in your commitments, and may your work be of great benefit to many!