What can a crouton tell us about purpose?
Croutons, the crispy, often cubed and sometimes impossible to pierce and more easy to ping across the room with a fork, bread based salad or soup item, in theory are not the intended outcome of their origin.
In the same way croutons are unlikely to be the intended outcome of a loaf of bread (ignoring the possible crouton industry that mass manufactures them in plastic bags for salad boxes and such like), what are the things we create or are created that become something totally different?
Croutons are meant to be made from stale bread, a way of using up old bread, in the same way stuffing or bread and butter pudding could be other uses for stale bread. In fact, you can even use stale bread as the basis for making new fresh bread!
All this came to mind, when making croutons. With no stale bread, or bread of any kind, in the house, I had to make these croutons out of a fresh baguette. While bread is all made to be eaten, it seems unlikely that being turned into croutons was high up on the list of uses for a fresh baguette.
In the way things transform, what does that tell us about purpose and intention?
Purpose shifts
As has been said, croutons likely are not the intention of the bread being baked, however they can be the result.
Purpose shifts as context and circumstance shift.
Purpose does not live in a vacuum.
The Guinness Book of records famously started out as a marketing ploy by Guinness. The book was an accompaniment for people as they bought and drank their Guinness. Yet, now they seem so separate and distinct that if Guinness wasn’t in the name it would be easy to miss the connection.
What are the things you notice that have come when the purpose of something has shifted or the result has led to something different to the initial, intended purpose?
Is there a higher purpose or at least a hierarchy of purposes?
Still, like bread, a crouton’s aim is to be eaten. No doubt the Guinness Book of records aimed to create more Guinness sales to create more income for Guinness. The growth of the Book of Records into its own entity no doubt created more income, simply in a different and unintended way.
All this begs the question, is there always a higher purpose? That is, if we zoom out far enough is there an overarching purpose and direction we want something to go in that sits above how it transpires? For example, going back to the crouton and bread, the purpose of each is different in the sense of what they are used for, but their overarching purpose is to provide sustenance, which both do in different ways. So, while the purpose of something can shift, does it always have a higher or ultimate purpose it is always seeking to fulfil or move towards?
Perhaps we can see two purposes:
the ‘What purpose’ - what is this thing for? E.g for bread and the crouton it is to feed and sustain us
the ‘How purpose’ - how will this achieve what it is for? E.g. as a crouton it is to go in a salad as part of a sustaining meal
It feels more likely that the ‘how purpose’ shifts, in the way the Guinness Book of Records and bread becoming a crouton do, while what it is working towards, often stays the same.
A crouton is a crouton, how can it have a Higher purpose?
This blog has previously written about how we see a fork reflects how we can choose to see all aspects of life.
Purpose seems similar. We see purpose in us and in other things.
In fact, what if everything is purposeful and that comes from how we choose to see it?
Take purposelessness, a very real and sometimes disheartening state of being for many people. At the same time the purpose of purposelessness could be to form a sense of purpose? We could choose to see ourselves as being lost or as finding a way, or both at the same time. Purposelessness can be the first step to finding or rediscovering a sense of purpose.
In this way the humble crouton could be seen as a way to use up old bread or a way of reclaiming the bread’s original purpose, which if going stale clearly hadn’t been fulfilled.
Before we begin hunting for purpose in everything, or thinking everything needs to have a clear purpose, or that we need to be able to say on demand the purpose of the thing we’re doing or our purpose, what if this is really about trusting that each moment, each situation, each thing we do and create has a purpose and once in a while curiously consider what the purpose of some of those things are?
Purpose comes, purpose goes, sometimes we may never know. Maybe it is about the how more than the what.
Purpose can be useful, it can give us a sense of direction and meaning in life. However, like the crouton, which is unlikely to be aware of its purpose or journey to realising it (or not), we may not know, may never know, the purpose of something or even our lives.
Yet in the potential absence of a ‘what purpose’ — What is my purpose? What is my life for? What is the point in all of this? What is the purpose of a blog on croutons? — there is always a ‘how purpose’ we can choose.
How do I want to find purpose in life?
How do I want to be regardless of whether I have a clear direction?
What are the principles I want to follow?
How do I want to be when feeling purposeful or purposeless?
Ultimately how we are is what we become and how we see what is and what we create.
So, regardless of purpose, how do you want to be?
