"People Who Lose Their Purpose..."

"are broken."

It's a line from "Hugo," Scorsese's fairy tale-like homage to film pioneer Georges Méliès, one of this year's Oscar nominated films.

[It's Oscar season, and we as dutiful Lalaland consumers generally try to see them all. We've seen all but a couple of the titles mentioned in major categories. "Hugo" was one we were missing. Interestingly, as the quote my title suggests, it is something of a moral tale.

People who lose their purpose are broken.

The way it shows up in the film started me to thinking about the idea differently than I might have seeing it stand on the page alone. If one does the kind of organization work I have done for my career, or if you participate in personal development work, or read any number of self-help guru's, finding out about your purpose is a kind of self-actualization holy grail.

The first thing my grad students read for the course I teach is an article about core values and core purpose.

Too often it seems to me that the articulation of a purpose becomes about a want or desire, rather than as a reason for being, which is what the context of "Hugo" sets for the line. How many earnest human potentialees chanted purposes that had to do with possessions or status? It's that evidence of being among the chosen thing that I wrote about in one of my entries on religion. In "Hugo" the metaphor is the machine where every part has a purpose--a reason to exist.

The equivalent corporate distortion in numerous mission/vision creating exercises is the spinning out of a statement that is a best aspirational, but at worst a self-con that eschews the actual demonstrated behavior in favor of a tell em what they want to hear marketing pitch. The article my students read talks about the need to "discover" what the values and purpose are.

Reading back over what I have just written, I'm wondering whether I haven't just reorganized the deck chairs in the conversation about determinism and free will.

I get that "declaration" has power. That one could find purpose by committing to purpose. And on the other side, I can see clearly that if I do not discover purpose that is true to who I am... who I think I am... who... ??? Maybe I don't see so clearly after all.

Still, it seems to me that a value around authenticity and truth to self is sorely needed. That not having a purpose somehow bigger than who you are means something is broken. We are getting to watch so many multiple examples of brokenness in our public "leaders" that when one shows up who is authentic and real like Gabby Giffords, we seem to know it instantly.

Shame it also seems that we have to stamp these instances out as quickly as we can.