Prioritizing Purpose

I saw a story about Angelica Vargas the other day and I wanted to highlight her efforts. She’s spending large amounts of time helping and protecting undocumented communities in Los Angeles. This includes driving around LA neighborhoods, warning people when ICE is around, and essentially scaring away agents before they can take anyone.

Not only is this incredible and inspiring work, it’s also an amazing example of embracing and prioritizing meaningful work no matter what it looks like.

Perhaps you’ve had moments like me in the last few months (or even the last few years) where you’ve looked around at the world and felt a huge clash between what what you feel like you should be prioritizing in your life and what actually gets prioritized in your day to day. For me, this shows up as a strong desire to write and eventually use herbs to bring some healing to the world. To help people see themselves more clearly and take aligned action from that place of clarity. But there is also the reality of needing a paycheck, and unfortunately I usually prioritize the work that brings in the money over the work that feels meaningful and purposeful.

As much as I would love to, I can’t discount reality. A source of income is a necessity in this world we live in. Benefits are extremely helpful when things like healthcare are becoming harder and harder to acquire. I don’t even have dependents or a mortgage, which is a reality for others that makes income and ideally benefits even more necessary.

But Angelica has me questioning how much I trap myself in my current priorities because of the conditioning I’ve received throughout my life around money, security, and what “normal” looks like.

I don’t know that much about her. She might have a job or jobs that she’s working around. She may or may not have a family she’s supporting. But whatever her circumstances, she saw a task that needed doing and she decided it was going to be hers. Despite the cost of gas and the wear and tear on her car, despite the risk of arrest, despite the fact that it probably takes a lot of time. She decided she was going to make it work however she could. And after she decided that, after she started taking action, people asked her to open up a way for them to support her because they wanted her to succeed.

I often get caught in the trap of believing that in order to live out my purpose, I have to find a way to sustain myself so that I’m assured some sort of security and then I’ll take a massive leap into a more meaningful life. But as Angelica’s story shows, sometimes we have to take some action first, even when we don’t know how it’s going to work out, and then the universe provides a way to make it possible.

The other trap is to believe it has to be a huge leap. Yes, sometimes there are huge leaps of faith that pay off. But what looks like a huge leap from the outside is often a series of small steps that most people don’t see. On my end, this currently looks like showing up to my computer every weekend to write and taking herbalism classes. It’s not as sexy as, “I quit my job and trusted that I would start making enough to pay my bills, and then I magically did!” Aka the standard I often judge myself by. But it is momentum that will eventually build into something more one step at a time.

Even though I’m taking these steps, it’s the prioritization that has me thinking. It’s the believing that I can do something even when I don’t have proof. When money is my central focus (as it often is thanks to scarcity-based capitalism), it’s easy to lose sight of what I’m working toward. It’s easy to push my writing or my herbalism training off because I get stuck finishing work projects well past when I told myself I was going to stop. It’s easy to forget to take care of myself so I have the health and energy for my writing and herbalism.

And Angelica’s story is a reminder that actually, maybe my priorities are backward. I don’t necessarily need to quit my job, but I also don’t have to prioritize it above the things that feel most meaningful and purposeful to me. I don’t have to believe the fear that if my day job is not my number one priority then I’ll lose it. And even if that does happen, that doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be a new solution when I need it. In other words, I probably shouldn’t plan my priorities around problems that aren’t even real in the present moment.

That might seem like delusional thinking, but I strongly believe that if we start changing our priorities, if we start taking action even when it’s bizarre or irrational because it aligns with the world we want to live in, that is how the world we want to live in gets created. So the next time you’re questioning your priorities, think of that as the perfect opportunity to take a step back and ask yourself:

What is my real priority?

Then take action accordingly.