Monday Matters: "I've Got a Special Purpose!"

I could probably write an entire blog post about why The Jerk is a nearly perfect movie, and maybe someday I will. But for now, I want to talk about Navin Johnson and his “special purpose.”

If you haven't seen The Jerk, Navin, played by Steve Martin, is one of the great characters in American comedy. He is naive beyond reason. He misunderstands almost everything. He wanders into situations for which he is spectacularly unprepared and somehow remains convinced everything will work out. And yet, beneath all the absurdity, Navin is an extraordinarily good person.

He is curious. He is enthusiastic. He loves without much reservation. He believes people. He wants to help. When good fortune finally finds him, one of his first instincts is to share it. Even his disastrous inventions begin with the idea that he has figured out something that might make somebody's life a little better. The world repeatedly gives Navin reasons to become cynical, and somehow he doesn't. I think that is part of why I have always loved him.

One scene in particular has stayed with me for most of my life. Navin announces to Marie, played by Bernadette Peters, that he has discovered his “special purpose.” I am not so naive that I don't understand the joke, but I am also old enough and, I hope, wise enough to know that two things can be true at once. I have always believed that I have a special purpose, too.

I couldn't tell you exactly what it was when I was younger. I'm not sure I could give you a tidy definition of it now. But I have felt it pulling me toward things throughout my life, including things that didn't always make much sense on the surface. It has led me to give my all to projects when there wasn't much in it for me. It has led me to work for causes that couldn't pay me, organizations that needed more than they could give back, and ideas other people didn't always understand. More than once, it has led me to work damned near to death with no particular expectation of personal gain.

Why? Because I believed in something larger than myself, and I still do. There is a little bit of Navin Johnson in that. Not the spectacular naivete, I hope. Age and experience have taken care of a fair amount of that. But I hope I have held onto some of the other things.

I hope I have held onto the willingness to believe that something can be better, the instinct to help when I have something useful to offer, the enthusiasm to try something that might look ridiculous to somebody else, and the ability to care about something without first calculating what I am going to get in return. Those qualities can take you to some strange places. They certainly have me.

Writing, teaching, fundraising, communications, the arts, nonprofits, community work, accessibility, technology, governance, helping organizations figure out what comes next. For a long time, those might have looked like separate things. I'm beginning to suspect they weren't.

When I was younger, I thought purpose was something you found, almost as though a great revelation would eventually come: Aha! This is the thing I am supposed to do. Now I think we build our way toward it. Every strange job teaches us something. Every organization gives us another piece of the puzzle. Every project gives us another skill. Every success teaches us what works, and every spectacular failure teaches us something, too.

Eventually, if we're lucky, we accumulate enough years to turn around and see that what looked like a collection of detours was actually a road. Sometimes that road starts pointing toward something new, not necessarily something that replaces everything that came before it, but perhaps something that gathers those experiences together and asks what you can make from them. That possibility interests me enormously.

Perhaps a special purpose isn't one job, one organization, one title, or even one cause. Maybe it is the thread running through all of them. Maybe the real wisdom isn't figuring everything out before you begin. Maybe it is remaining curious enough to keep following that thread, experienced enough to recognize what you've learned along the way, and just naive enough to believe you might still be able to do some good.

Navin Johnson may have meant something entirely different by his “special purpose,” but after all these years, I think he was onto something anyway. Sometimes you discover your special purpose, and sometimes, if you're paying attention, you realize you've known it all along.