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I see purposes the following way. Imagine a web where there are many points. The points are your purposes. These purposes are interconnected. At the center there is you, the spider who spins the web. The closer the points (or purposes) the you, the more distant and “greater” the purpose is. Everyone has its own web. I deeply think that if somebody’s purposes are not well-linked to each other, there is no common greater denominator, there will be holes in your spiderweb. Why is it a problem? Well, to use this visual aid, the spiderweb, there are flying insects that you want to catch by means of your web — these are opportunities. You will lose opportunities that will help you to reach your best potential and your wanted purposes. The web is all the more real, because there are numerous cases when an opportunity is so great that it causes the web to get damaged; you question whether a purpose is really a purpose. You question whether a purpose fits the whole web-system.

Let us leave a little bit behind the spiderweb metafore and take a different approach of purposes. The metafore has great implications, yet great weaknesses that we have to deal with. There are a number of opportunities that we find that have just appeared out of nowhere; yet again, it is unclear how it will serve our purposes but we feel that it will do good for us, and thus we seize it.

This very thing leads us to the self-made term the dynamism of purposes. Note that I have not written dynamic purposes; I wanted to emphasise two things. First, there is a certain dynamism regarding purposes despite the very popular belief that purposes are claimed to be static (considering the optimal conditions of purposes). Second, despite this dynamism, it cannot be considered to be entirely dynamic and flexible. There is just a limited flexibility and change. These have to be taken into consideration as it helps us to think about our purposes in a more realistic fashion. Helps us to explain why many purposes changed or did not change but we did not achieve it — yet we achieved something more fulfilling.

When we set our goals, when we have those ultimate purposes, we have a good number of experience of that we have accumulated through our lives. These experiences help us to see the world as it is today; the more conscious approach we have had, the better (see my post with the title “Experience”). We make assumptions of the aforementioned goals based on these experience, the way we know ourselves, the way we see the world around us now and our expectations of what it is going to become.

The dynamism of purposes is the consequence of the nature of these assumptions that are inherently present in this imagery web-system. This just means that we have to question and reassure or in other case substitute our purposes on a regular basis. Awareness is a great asset to be ahead of impending changes that help us to be better off and to be satisfied with our lives. The great question is: can we change our whole web? Yes and no. At first sight it seems that once we change our ultimate/highest purpose, all the other purposes may change. This is true to some extent. However, we cannot change our previous experience, thus the whole web system will not change — it cannot change overnight. But gradually it can. In the upcoming article, I am going to extend this to organisations as well.