September 21st began with the kind of domestic optimism that only appears when guests are coming over. I opened the windows, put a record on and started cleaning as though nobody had ever lived in the house before. There is something remarkably motivating about knowing people will arrive in a few hours. Dust you have peacefully coexisted with for days suddenly becomes unacceptable. Cushions need arranging. Tables need wiping. Objects that have been sitting happily in the wrong place for a week are abruptly returned to their proper homes. Apparently hospitality can achieve what personal discipline occasionally cannot.

The record player helped. I still like vinyl for reasons that are probably partly sentimental and partly impractical. There is the tiny crackle before the music starts, the ritual of choosing an album, and the fact that you cannot simply skip every song after twelve seconds because your attention span has been trained by the internet. It forces me to stay with the music for a while. So I cleaned with a soundtrack, occasionally convincing myself that I was having a beautifully curated Sunday morning when, in reality, I was carrying rubbish bags and looking for the missing attachment to the vacuum cleaner.

The reason for all this activity was Louie’s advance birthday celebration. Nothing enormous had been planned. There was no hired venue, complicated programme or event coordinator carrying a clipboard and looking worried. It was simply one of those gatherings built around food, familiar people and the universal understanding that a birthday is an excellent excuse to eat considerably more than an ordinary Sunday would normally justify.

By lunchtime, the house had changed completely. The quiet morning disappeared beneath conversation, footsteps and the smell of food. There was baked pasta with the properly browned top that makes restraint difficult, crispy chicken, a charcuterie board doing its best impression of sophistication, and a birthday cake waiting for its moment. The table looked abundant, although I knew exactly how much chopping, arranging, reheating and last-minute checking had happened behind the scenes. Photographs make hosting look remarkably effortless.

Then everyone arrived, and the house I had spent the morning carefully restoring to order lasted approximately seven minutes.

This was probably the correct outcome.

People gathered around the food, conversations began overlapping and somebody was always laughing at something happening on the other side of the room. Louie sat there with balloons, surrounded by people who had come specifically because he mattered to them. The dogs and cats circulated through the gathering as unofficial quality-control inspectors, particularly interested in anything that might accidentally reach floor level. No celebration in a house with animals remains entirely human for long.

At some point, while looking around the room, I started thinking about ikigai. Not in the beautifully illustrated diagram sense where your entire existence is expected to fit into several perfectly overlapping circles. Real life has never looked that organised to me. I was thinking about the simpler idea behind it: the things that give us a reason to get up, participate and care about the day in front of us.

I used to imagine that a “reason for being” should sound impressive. It should involve a calling, a career, a major contribution or something substantial enough to mention in an interview without sounding as though you had misunderstood the question.

Purpose seemed like the sort of thing you were supposed to discover after years of soul-searching, preferably somewhere scenic.

That Sunday, mine looked suspiciously like baked pasta.

It looked like cleaning the house because people were coming. It looked like preparing food and making space around the table. It looked like putting music on before anybody arrived and later struggling to hear it because everyone was talking over one another. It looked like somebody holding birthday balloons while everyone else tried to get a decent photograph. Nothing about it was extraordinary, which may have been the point.

Maybe we make purpose more complicated than it needs to be.

We often talk about purpose as though everyone is required to identify one enormous mission and spend the rest of life pursuing it. But I am not convinced purpose always operates at that scale. Sometimes it is attached to the work we do. Sometimes it comes through creating something. Sometimes it is family, faith, service, friendship or caring for another living thing. And sometimes it is simply making an ordinary day better for someone because you had the ability to do so.

That does not mean every chore suddenly becomes spiritually significant. I refuse to pretend cleaning the bathroom fills me with existential fulfilment. Some tasks remain tasks. But there is a difference between cleaning because the floor needs cleaning and preparing a home because people you care about are about to fill it. The action may look similar from the outside; the reason changes everything.

Food has always worked that way for me too. A plate is rarely only a plate when it is shared. Preparing more than necessary, telling people to eat, offering seconds before they have technically finished firsts and sending leftovers home are all practically a family dialect. We may not always say everything directly, but apparently we are perfectly comfortable communicating affection through carbohydrates.

That afternoon reminded me that meaning does not require constant seriousness either. We laughed. We ate. People teased one another. The pets behaved like pets. There were probably crumbs in places I had cleaned that morning. Nobody paused the party to announce that we were currently experiencing a meaningful moment.

Thank goodness.

The best parts of life rarely identify themselves while they are happening. We recognise them later through photographs, smells, jokes somebody repeats months afterwards or the sudden memory of how a room sounded when everyone we loved happened to be inside it at once. At the time, we are usually too busy asking who wants more chicken.

That is probably what I like about the idea of ikigai now. I do not need it to provide one enormous answer to the question of what my entire life is for. I am happy for the answer to change depending on the day. Nursing can give one kind of purpose. Writing gives another. Faith gives another. Family, friendships, animals, creativity and the simple pleasure of making people feel welcome all belong somewhere in the same picture.

Maybe purpose is not a destination we eventually arrive at after completing enough personal development. Maybe it is something we keep assembling from what we repeatedly choose to care about.

That Sunday, I chose to clean, prepare, cook, gather, celebrate and pay attention. Not because I was intentionally practising a Japanese philosophy before lunch, but because somebody had a birthday and we wanted him to feel loved. Sometimes meaning is remarkably practical.

By the end of the day, the balloons were still standing, the food had been considerably reduced, the house had lost the battle against perfect cleanliness and my phone contained more photographs than any single afternoon reasonably required. The morning’s carefully arranged calm had become a comfortable mess.

I preferred it that way.

If someone asked me now for the best advice I have ever received about living well, I do not think I would give them something grand. I would probably say this: stop waiting for every meaningful part of your life to look important. Cook the food. Invite the people. Play the record. Take the photograph. Celebrate the birthday a little early if that is when everyone can come.

Purpose may be hiding in far less impressive places than we expect.

Sometimes, apparently, it is standing beside the birthday cake asking whether anyone wants another slice.

-ANJ ❤