Finding Our Bifrost

At the first Rotaract Mass Meeting last semester, I mentioned a Harvard Business Review article by Oliver Segovia that calls for us to abandon the pursuit of passion and instead focus on finding the big problems facing the world. For many of us, 'passion' has taken on a reverent status through years of deliberate cultivation by the people and institutions that have shaped our character and values. Our notions of purpose, meaning and self-fulfillment are therefore intricately linked with our passions, and the pursuit of which becomes the race of our lives. Analogous to the Bifrost in Norse mythology, passion has become that shiny rainbow bridge that offers a shimmering path to true happiness.

Now I would like to echo Segovia's sentiments that passion is not the only Bifrost to purpose and meaning in our lives. After all Dorothy had the Yellow Brick Road, Jack had his beanstalk and Narnia was reached by a closet. The point is, the path to fulfillment comes in many forms, and passion is just the one of many routes to achieve the ends of a purposeful life. Before we are too quick to jump onto the bandwagon and follow the Bifrost of passion, I feel that it is crucial to first examine the things that motivate us to action and then decide to make a path of it. If you ask me for example, I could not tell you what my passion is because like many of my peers, I'm too am searching for my Bifrost of meaning. But I can definitely tell you what are my values and principles, and these personal pillars are what motivates me to action. Understanding our deepest beliefs and motivations is thus the key to unlocking our most suitable Bifrost.

Now what does all these have to do with the our international trip you say? This is where finding problems that we want to solve come in. Passion on the one hand, is certainly worth pursuing. But it is also centered on the self, focused on personal interests and inward-looking. Segovia's plea for us to look beyond our passion to find fulfillment targets precisely this egocentric notion of a meaningful life. There is a whole realm of happiness and fulfillment to be discovered through advancing the interests of other people. We need to look past the trappings of individual satisfaction and instead ask ourselves what we can do for the benefit of others in order to achieve a higher degree of fulfillment. To this end, I cannot put it more eloquently than Segovia does:

'We don't find happiness by looking within. We go outside and immerse in the world. We are called to a higher purpose by the inescapable circumstances that are laid out on our path. It's our daily struggles that define us and bring out the best in us, and this lays down the foundation to continuously find fulfillment in what we do even when times get tough.'

As we count down to the final hours before our journey, I hope we can all keep this thought in mind. That finding fulfillment does not necessarily have to occur over a single-lane bridge. If we can build a Bifrost of purpose that empowers the lesser endowed; that combines our own ends with the ends of other people, then we know we have achieved something special. 

In the spirit of service,
Rui