For The Worldbuilders Ep. 033

But…"I Don’t Know My Purpose": The Year of Childhood Curiosity

Image description: A black and white film photo of me inside my apartment in Brooklyn, NY in 2019. I’m sitting in the bed wearing a headscarf and button down shirt with a film camera, books and clothes in the foreground. Sunlight streams in from the window hitting my plant, tea and shoulder as I look away from the camera with a pen in my hand and journal in my lap trying to imagine a world where black feminist poets survive and then some. Photography: Chukwudumebi Ezefili

Hey fellow Worldbuilder,

How are we doing? In this podcast episode I come clean and admit I’ve been feeling a bit numb this week. Between the worsening genocide in Gaza, the air strike in Beirut (and what that could mean for the region and the world) and COVID cases rising. There is so much nervous system and prayer work I’ve been doing to have expansive conversations with friends, family and our online communities…work I was doing to not fall into despair because I know how powerful the spell of movement is. Even if it’s the smallest step, the smallest action still has a rippling, vibrational impact but the dissonance is starting to feel a bit unbearable and unsustainable because it is.

• Genocide is unbearable because it is inhumane

• Colonial violence is unbearable because it is inhumane

• The value systems of empire are unbearable because they are inhumane

• Our nervous systems aren’t meant to bear this no matter the tools we’ve cultivated inside our journey of healing through trauma

If you’ve been following along you know, my relationship to being human is tenuous at best. I’ve been writing poems as an AI named Zenith to stay in motion because “coping” isn’t possible. You might find metallic flecks of them glitter my Instagram feed or future newsletters.

In the meantime…let’s get into this week’s podcast. Inside this episode we address a phrase I’ve been hearing a lot lately, “But…I don’t know my purpose”.

We release the claim to purpose and focus on answering 3 questions instead:

1. What’s my practice?

2. What reliable energy source fuels my practice?

3. What’s my project?

We enter “The Year of Childhood Curiosity” with the following strategy, tip and remembrance spell.

Strategy: Our practices are powered by the most reliable, dependable, renewable creative fuel there is: curiosity. Instead of prioritizing purpose, we prioritize the gentler, more playful force of curiosity — allowing it to power our practice for a season, a year, a lifetime. Make a list of all your favorite activities in childhood, your favorite methods and modes of play. List the ways of being creative and playful you kept returning to. Were you always reading or writing something? Were you always building or taking something apart?

Tip: Ask family members, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and childhood best friends what are those activities I kept returning to in moments of play? Listen for “we couldn’t keep you out of…” or “we couldn’t keep you off of…”. For me this sounded like, “we couldn’t keep you off the computer” which points to my curiosity in the sociality of code, community and self-actualizing online. Another consistent theme was “you were always making something with your hands” which might point to my curiosities in design, engineering and sculpting space. What themes emerge as you go down memory lane with loved ones?

Remember: We were all born with creative gifts that connect us to community provision in adulthood. This is a pre-colonial truth. What if we believed these gifts are seeds of curiosity that inform how we might be able to reliably show up inside community? What if we remembered we are worthy of the ease of showing up in alignment with the reliable source of our creative curiosity? What if we remembered painful work doesn’t make us more loveable? I’m talking to my workaholics here! Speaking from experience, I’m one in recovery. What if we remembered love is not something we earn? It’s something we are.

That’s the hard work that seeking out our purpose keeps us distracted from. Revolutionary love is the practice and our creative curiosity keeps us returning to it. Now what form might our overlapping practice and constellation of curiosities take?

Join us inside the free Worldbuilding Workshop happening on Tuesday, January 16th at 12pm EST. Inside the workshop you’ll learn more about the Seed A World Retreat and how your practice and curiosity might converge into an offer that feels like your purpose, only because it feels like play that could keep you engaged for a lifetime.