What It Means to Grow Into Purpose
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
By Oriana Sparks
Founder, Oriana Sparks Joy
For much of my life, I understood purpose as something cumulative. You moved toward it steadily, collecting the right credentials, relationships, and milestones along the way. Purpose was evidence that your choices had been correct. Fulfillment, in that model, was a kind of confirmation—external, legible, and often praised. I believed this not because I had examined it closely, but because it was the water I was swimming in. With a Chinese father and Eastern European mother, I was raised to be a good girl.
That understanding did not survive the spring of 2018. Eleven days after the birth of my third child, my husband died suddenly. In an instant, the future I had assumed—one built on continuity and shared
momentum—collapsed. Events like that do not simply disrupt plans; they render old frameworks unusable. The language you once used to describe meaning no longer applies.
In the immediate aftermath, purpose contracted. It became functional and narrow: caring for my children, enduring the day, breathing through the night. The expansive questions—Who am I becoming? What am I building?—fell away, replaced by the urgency of staying present enough to survive. At the time, this felt like loss layered upon loss. Only later did I recognize it as a stripping down.
Before grief, I had been adept at fulfilling roles. I measured my worth by usefulness and coherence, by how well I managed responsibility and met expectation. Grief dismantled that orientation. It exposed how much of my sense of purpose had been contingent—dependent on stability, partnership, and the illusion that life could be managed through effort alone. What remained was not ambition, but attention.
Over time, purpose began to re-form, though not in the way I had expected. It no longer felt aspirational or performative. It became orientational; a way of facing life rather than advancing through it. Purpose, I came to understand, was less about what I was producing and more about how honestly I was inhabiting my own experience. Listening replaced striving. Discernment replaced endurance.
Fulfillment changed alongside it. What once looked like achievement now looked like alignment. Fulfillment became quieter and less visible, rooted in integrity rather than accumulation. It showed up as boundaries kept, truths acknowledged, and a growing comfort with saying no. It showed up in the choice to value depth over approval, presence over momentum, coherence over constant forward motion.
Experience brings with it a particular kind of wisdom; not the certainty of answers, but a tolerance for complexity. I learned that healing is not linear, that discipline can be an act of care rather than control, and that mindfulness is not a retreat from difficulty but a practice of staying present long enough to be shaped by it. Grief did not make life safer or simpler. It made it more exacting, and more real.
Today, purpose no longer feels like something to be achieved. It feels like something that emerges through attention and honesty. My work, and my life, are now oriented toward creating space—internally and externally—for people to slow down, tell the truth, and notice what is already happening within them. Fulfillment, now, is coherence: the narrowing gap between what I feel and what I am willing to acknowledge.
Purpose, I’ve learned, is not a destination. It is something you grow into as life removes what no longer fits. And wisdom lies in staying present as that evolution unfolds; reminding yourself to surrender to the unknown, and to always be ready for each moment to be more than you expect.
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