We’re talking about finding and knowing our meaning and purpose this month. Knowing that we count and acting on the knowledge with purpose can help us to overcome the mental toll the pandemic has taken on so many of us.
As an example, there is this story about frontline health worker. For the last year Storycorps Connect has been collecting video conferencing stories. Storycorps is a nonprofit dedicated to recording the largest collection of human stories that normally records in face-to-face conversations. In an article about it featured on the Ted Talks website, ideas.ted.com, a dozen people talk about what has changed for the better for them. In one case, healthcare worker Sam Dow, found his purpose by reading the classic novel The Plague, by Albert Camus.
He said in the article, “It’s about an epidemic, and the main character was a doctor. And he says the way to get through something like this is to be a decent person. Somebody asks him, ‘What makes a decent person?’ He says, ‘I don’t know but, for me, it’s just doing my job the best way I can.’” Dow went on to say that is how he has approached his work, as best he could, to try to make a difference in people’s lives.
Even while he is facing exhausting, debilitating work, Dow found purpose through working to make the lives of other people better.