How Interruptions in Life Can Lead to Greater Purpose

I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago visiting my son and his family (including our first, five-month-old grandchild). On Saturday afternoon, we went to a birthday party picnic for one of my son’s friends. It was held at a beautiful park in the Presidio. As I talked with the guests, I had a young man–in his early thirties, I would guess–tell me a startling story.

Months earlier, he and a friend were walking across an intersection in San Francisco. The pedestrian signal was green, and they were talking as they walked in the crosswalk. Out of nowhere, a car turned into the crosswalk and slammed into both of them. They bounced and skidded on the road, sustaining multiple injuries, and an ambulance took them to the hospital. This young man spent two weeks in the hospital recovering, and while there he learned that the driver was uninsured.

The park where the picnic was held

As he told me this story, I was expecting it to be a tale of anger at the driver, or of retribution with lawsuits, or maybe of perseverance as he pieced his life back together. 

Instead, it was a story of purpose. While in the hospital, this young man had a lot of time to think about his life. When he was got out, he started making big changes. He quit his job in the lucrative but high-pressure field of commercial real estate. He left San Francisco and moved back to his family home in Sacramento. He started training for a different, more fulfilling career.

I’ve heard stories like this before. A friend, a young woman in her twenties, did something similar when she quit her job, moved home, and launched a new career, but she did it in the aftermath of an unexpected and painful romantic breakup. Likewise, another friend—years ago—had a terrible fall while rock climbing. Somehow he lived, and during his extended recovery, he reprioritized his life. He chose to put a much greater emphasis on family.

Here’s the pattern: something big and traumatic happens in one area of life, and it leads to making purposeful changes in other areas. Why does this happen, and what can we learn from it about finding purpose?

Pattern Interrupts

Each of the stories above illustrates what is called a “pattern interrupt.” Something unexpected occurs and pushes us out of our automatic routine. This causes us to become more aware of both our current state of being and possible alternatives to it. In this way, the interruption impacts our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. It allows us to view our life from a completely different perspective.

Marketers use pattern interrupts to great effect. If we’re reading a magazine or surfing the web, we see many advertisements, and, for the most part, we give them little attention. But sometimes an advertisement surprises or shocks us. Maybe it features someone famous or provocative. Maybe it portrays something upsetting, makes us laugh, or makes an outrageous claim. In this way, the advertisement knocks us out of automatic processing so that we pay more attention to it.

Applied to Purpose

Pattern interrupts can play an important role in finding purpose. They move us out of our “normal” daily life with our typical circumstances, routines, and habits, and they open us up to different ways of engaging our world. They create space in our life that we can then fill with things that matter to us more.

The value of pattern interrupts shows up in our purpose training. When people attend our classes and bootcamps, they are in a new setting. They sit in a new room, eat new food, talk to new people, and they put away their phones. In this context, participants learn about purpose research, and they are given prompts and exercises that cultivate a new way of looking at their life. The change in routine opens the door for a deeper reflection on life.

Interrupting Our Own Patterns

Can we intentionally recreate this powerful mechanism of change in our own lives? Yes.

We can implement pattern interrupts in our day-to-day living. For example, we can sit in silence, go for a walk with a friend, take the car for a drive–whatever it takes to get us out of our usual activities and into a different space. Meditation can also do this, as it moves our mind away from the urgent busyness of the day.

We can also create larger pattern interrupts with new experiences. Travel takes us to places where we interact with new people and do things differently. Retreats, likewise, put us into a new setting with different schedules and activities. Extended adventures, such as hiking or biking or camping, are also ways to interrupt the patterns of our everyday life. 

In a backward way, pattern interrupts, and their impact on purpose, point the way to a significant barrier to finding purpose in today’s world. The stifling pressure of our daily activities both distracts us from deeper longings and moves away from what matters most. Stepping aside from these activities can assist us in finding deeper purpose in life. 

Updates

• Five years ago, the Life Purpose Lab started off as a research project. After we realized the power of our training, we started offering it to the public via small-group training programs. Last month we trained our 500th person. Cue party horns!

• To date, we’ve referred to our two-day training events as “workshops.” At the suggestion of a recent participant, we’re thinking about renaming them as “bootcamps.” Perhaps “bootcamp” better conveys what happens: in-depth training during a limited period of time that launches people into a new way of living. Any thoughts?

• Spending a week with my son and his family was deeply gratifying. He was on paternity leave, so he, my grandson, and I spent days just hanging out together. The time was as precious as it is rare.

• Several people read early drafts of these essays and suggest improvements. If you would like to do this, please let me know. It’s very helpful for me. 

• Thank you Susan and Eran for your feedback.

• On Substack, you get solicitations for financial support for me. This is done by Substack and not by me (they take a cut of the support), and I can’t turn them off.