Call it what you will, as long as you don’t call it a job.

I care not a whit about knitting, but I am a fan of?Martin McDonough’s?serene, sad, and amusing?movie,?The Banshees of Inishirin, so when I saw an?obit?on Delia Barry, the person who knit the sweaters adorning?Colin Farrell’s?character, I was drawn to reading further.

Barry’s not a colleague or friend, she didn’t work in advertising, so there’s not much I could say by way of tribute.?The movie more than the person attracted me to the story, with the story ending in her revealing quote:

“Because you get older, it doesn’t mean that you’re not useful anymore. There’s a lot we can do, if we want to.”

An?obit?for the Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, someone I would have overlooked had he not co-starred with Julie Christie in Sarah Polley’s?film,?Away from Her, also caught my eye for much the same reason:

“When you’re in our 80s you can still have your best idea tomorrow. Retirement is never an issue. Retire from what?”

Retire indeed.

I’ve written many times before about not packing it in,?here,?here,?here,?here, and, finally,?here.?I’m flogging to death the point I want to make about age and accomplishment:?a legion of advertising opinions to the contrary, there absolutely is?no correlation?between how old you are and how capable you are.?

If anything, with the passage of?time comes wisdom and experience, institutional memory and method, all accumulating in skill that’s hard to measure but easy to appreciate when deployed in service of solving a problem or settling client turbulence.

Besides being no longer among the living, what do Barry and Pinsent – two people with nothing in common – have in common?

Both were creators.?Both operated essentially as independent contractors.?Both had a sense of inner drive, something Barry might call a “want to.”

Anything else?

If I weren’t making my customary Sunday evening pizza run, I would have missed?Shankar Vedantam’s?Hidden Brain?discussion on?PBS, about having a?sense of purpose.??

According to Vedantam, purpose,

“buffers us against the challenges we will all confront at various stages of our lives. It provides a measure of stability in uncertain times."?

Vedantam’s guest,?Cornell University?Psychology Professor?Anthony Burrow?thinks of purpose, “as a sense, a perceptible sense that life has a sense of direction.”?He distills purpose to its essence:

“do you have a reason for living?”

All of us have goals – complete that?Brief,?write that copy, design that layout, analyze those bids – but purpose is something else, something deeper, something more meaningful and motivating.?Even if it means taking a risk, it could be what propels you to strike out on your own, alter a career path, experiment with the unfamiliar, abandon the expected, or pursue whatever ambition drives you.

More than anything else, a sense of purpose is what I suspect fueled Delia Barry to keep knitting sweaters and Gordon Poinset to keep taking roles long after it’s past time for a final curtain call.?They didn’t do it for others and they didn’t do it for money; they did it for themselves.

I could have stayed in my lucrative President’s position, holding on for as long as I could, but I knew this is not where my purpose resides.?I left my job, opened my?practice, wrote a?book,?became a?speaker?and?executive coach, all in service of a vocation, a mission, a calling.?

Call it what you will, as long as you don’t call it a job.