Purpose
While reading his death warrant, Marquis de Favras apparently remarked, “I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.”
Issue No. 17
While reading his death warrant, Marquis de Favras apparently remarked, “I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.” Some say he then grabbed the scroll and proceeded to fix a few run-on sentences and a split infinitive. The guards had to wrestle the parchment away from him, on account of them having a backlog to get through, and him already being condemned to death and all.
I looked through a subreddit the other night, one I hadn’t visited in years, where people post about their struggles with finding a path in life. Exacerbated usually by trauma, mental fatigue, being pulled in different directions, not having a direction to begin with, disaffection, loss, or any number of other reasons that can preclude a person from putting one foot in front of the other.
A thought on the topic, in the hope it’s useful for anyone currently going through something like that.
I’d like to imagine that we each have some obscure skill. Something we realized at six or seven made us feel good, and that we wanted to do more of. Maybe we think it’s too quirky or banal, so we keep it concealed. Or maybe we’re too timid to turn it into a vocation. Or we decide it’s of no real value, or irrelevant to our studies or profession, so we dismiss it altogether. Heaven, I feel, is surrounding ourselves with people who’ll seek out that skill and let us nurture it. A step down from heaven is not losing sight of it as we go through life.
For me, it was writing. My earliest memory is being seven and my dad asking me to go into the other room and write a poem about a guest we had over. He’d do that often. So I’d go into his study, and write a page of rhyming verses. Some fanciful tale about what the person had to deal with on their way to our flat—the bus they almost missed, the puddle they stepped into, the umbrella that flew away. Always silly. I’d come back to the living room, read it out loud, and watch everyone in the room cackle.
Ah, so words can make people laugh.
And then as I got older, the world became a confusing place. There’s this feeling I’d often get, where I’d go into town, say, and pass by groups of people sitting outside a cafe, and I’d think to myself, Oh, that’s nice. Never realizing the world wasn’t immutable—I could be sitting right there with them. All I had to do was order a drink and take a seat. It almost felt like an out-of-body experience where I was seeing myself passively reacting to something. So on the bus ride back, I’d lean temple against window and sit with that feeling. And then write about it at home.
Ah, so words can help us make sense of the world.
And then as I got older still, I realized that words can’t be taken at face value. That there’s this thing called subtext. And that languages have idioms—turns of phrase that can’t be understood literally. And that nursery rhymes like Ba ba black sheep have double meanings. And that euphemisms can conceal unpleasant things. That double entendres conceal suggestive things. That associations can lead to tropes.
Ah, so words are like vessels, preloaded with meaning.
And then I realized I had a constant, visceral reaction to how words felt and sounded. I’d read a sentence ten different ways, and like some taster of good coffee, indulge in them—smacking my lips, making odd noises. I’d edit while walking, repeating the same line tens of times. To see if I ever got tired of hearing it the way it had been written. Hypersensitive to errors, always. Less rather than fewer. Imply rather than infer. Farther rather than further. Disinterested rather than uninterested. Effect rather than affect. Lay rather than lie. 90’s rather than ‘90s. A hyphen rather than an em dash. Github rather than GitHub, Javascript rather than JavaScript.1
Ah, so one can have a sort of psychosomatic relationship with words.
And then one morning in class, the lecturer kept using words I’d never heard or read before. And the more times she repeated them, the more uncomfortable it felt. Succinct, what’s that? Tautology? Orthogonal? Averse? Codified? Heuristic? Imperative? Permeate? Ethereal? Taxonomy? Onerous? Purview? So I started noting down all these words, phonetically, and then looked them up in a dictionary at home. And the more I did that, the more my thinking about ideas, especially abstract ones, went from what felt like a low-resolution image to a higher resolution one.
Ah, so more precise words can help us think better.
And then one day I realized that learning altogether is a vulnerable process, and that I had an unconventional way of getting through it. When no one was looking, I had to reexplain ideas to myself, with an approach that leaned on analogies, stories, and sketches. With my guard lowered one time, I shared that approach in a school assignment, and my lecturer left a comment saying something like, Never mind the analogies, just answer the [damn] question.2 But the voice in my head was adamant. So I tried it again many years later, this time with books that eventually connected with people far and wide.
Ah, so words can eventually connect us with like-minded people.
I share these snapshots from my own life to say that our proclivities start early and persist. I don’t know why that is, and I don’t know how callings are decanted into us. And whether it’s blind luck or other factors and experiences that bring them to the fore. Likely a combination of the two. It remains that every person I’ve ever met has had some skill or quality I found unique to them. I mean this genuinely.
I’d say to cast your mind back and figure out what that thing is for you. That thing that gnaws at you, constantly. That you seek refuge in when the going gets tough. That you’ve been told you have a penchant for. And once you figure it out, surround yourself with people who will let you spend a lifetime working on it until you get good at it.
Purpose is a funny thing. At certain points in life, we’re certain we have it. We might then lose it. So we scour the four corners of the world looking for it. Only to eventually realize we had it all along. And that’s the thought I wanted to leave you with. To seek that feeling within.
Until next time,
—Ali
P.S. Interested in sponsoring an issue?
I made a list of these one time: almossawi.com/plain-english-cheat-sheet
An assignment from 21 years ago (2003), where I was told to stop being annoying.
Beautiful. 🥰🙏
YES!!!! Love this!