Imagine that our life is like a ship’s journey, whereby we leave from a certain location and aim to make our way to a far-off destination. This destination reflects our meaning and purpose in life, and the trajectory of travel can be in harmony with our deepest purpose or purposes, passions, mission, needs or we may be sailing away from such a destination.

Just as with sailing, external factors can throw us off course — huge waves, the weather, storms, wind, the tide, rocks and other factors. In sailing, an orientation of just one degree continued for days, can result in one straying far away from the destination. And so, in our lives, a little deviation, repeated, can have a massive effect — we can be in the wrong relationship, the wrong job, the wrong place to live, and this may have happened slowly, over a long period of time, without being noticed. 

One important point to emphasise is that these external forces are not our fault or our responsibility

We need to assess which situation we are in, taking account of who is in the boat with us, from whom we can receive help, and how we can check our compass and find our bearings. Has the boat developed a hole which needs fixing? In our plans, we need to prepare for troubled waters, things which might go wrong, and accept that to go from A to B is rarely a straight line but can involve a complex route.

It is possible that we might not check our life compass regularly enough, and we might not notice a slight shift off course.

This metaphorical life compass has been developed to facilitate conversations, questions and deep discussion which enable a check to be made on where we are, and where we wish to be in life, with regard to our pattern of life, compared to our mission, purpose, needs and passions.