Constraints and the Art of Purposeful Living

Guest Writer: Caroline J. Simon

A story often wanders into my life just when I need it. I first encountered Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast as an audiobook I was playing while I drove across the country to begin a new job. I had a lot of apprehension about the risk of moving to an unfamiliar part of the country. I also had considerable self-doubt about whether I would succeed. Dinesen populates her short story with characters who make painful choices. One of the characters gives a speech about how we tremble before making major life decisions and tremble after making them for fear we may have chosen wrong. That rang so true to me that I found myself squinting through tears as I drove.

I was driving toward a job that I thought would finally give me full latitude for fulfilling my purpose. By the time that I was approaching my 30s, I was selective about what parts of my job history I listed on my resumé. My “career path” led from house cleaner to fast-food employee to broccoli packer to prep-cook/dishwasher to waitress to bank teller to college professor. Not a trajectory that a high school guidance counselor would recommend. Or that a search committee would take seriously.

People are always more than their job histories. Through all those different roles, I was most happy when I was learning. If the job itself was routine, then it left me mental space to ponder. There’s a lot of time to think when you are on a broccoli-packing assembly line. I became bored with banking once I’d shifted through three different roles, each with a learning curve to negotiate. My restlessness helped me see that sorting complexity and generating growth were central to my purpose. My love of learning eventually led me to graduate school as an entrance ticket to a career where I was paid to be a learner. Now I had snagged a tenure-track faculty position. But what if the college or the town was a big disappointment? Or what if I ended up being a big disappointment to my department chair, my students, or (far worse) to myself?

Self-doubt about being able to fulfill one’s purpose is a large challenge. But a more daunting challenge to living purposefully is a dissonant combination of clarity of purpose and life circumstances that thwart living it out. I was among the fortunate. There are aspiring college professors who spend years unsuccessfully seeking permanent teaching positions. Talented inventors who cannot find the capital to bring their inventions to market. Athletes who suffer career-ending injuries. Couples who want biological children but find themselves infertile. What we do not get and what we cannot do impacts us as profoundly as our freedoms. Is it possible to live purposefully even when confronted with such daunting constraints?

Babette’s final speech in Babette’s Feast speaks eloquently to living purposefully even in the face of roadblocks. To appreciate that speech you need to know a bit of her story. We first meet Babette when she arrives in a remote Scandinavian village as a destitute refugee. She has fled Paris in the wake of the French Revolution, after her husband and son are killed fighting alongside the revolutionaries. A mutual friend has sent Babette to two sisters who have spent their lives in the remote village, living out the pietistic ideals of their dead father. She doesn’t speak their language and all the sisters know of her is that she is in need and that, as the note from their friend affirms, “Babette can cook.”

Babette becomes maid and cook to the sisters. She spends twelve years preparing simple meals to the sisters’ specifications and making the soup they take to the poor and sick within their community. When Babette wins a lottery, she requests that the sisters allow her to make a special dinner in honor of their father’s one hundredth birthday anniversary. They grant her request, even though they do not approve of dinner parties and are fearful that the results will be sinfully extravagant and spiritually corrupting. They assume that Babette will use most of her winnings to return to Paris and that this is the last favor that they will be able to do for her before she goes.

The feast pairs a series of elegant wines with each of its multiple courses. The sisters’ friends do not understand what they are eating or drinking, but they have meaningful conversation and experience joy. Only after the feast is over do the sisters and the reader learn that, before the revolution, Babette was a renowned chef in Paris, famous for being able to turn a meal into a “love affair…in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety.” The sisters and their guests are transformed by Babette’s gift, though they have little understanding of her talent. In the final scene the sisters go into the kitchen to thank her and to wish her well on her journey. They are appalled when they learn that she has spent all her winnings on the ingredients of this one “nice dinner,” especially because they assume that she has done this for their sake.

Babette, almost indignantly, tells them that she made the feast for her sake, not theirs. She goes on to explain, “Through all the world there goes out one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!” After twelve years of living within the sisters’ pietistic restraints, Babette has again been able to use her gifts to their full. In response to their concerns that Babette, having spent all her winnings, will now be poor, she assures them that a great artist is never poor. “We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.”

Dinesen leaves it to readers to figure out for themselves why great artists are never poor, but she plants clues throughout the story. Babette has spent hours over the last twelve years studying the cookbook that she brought with her from Paris. She has dreamed of an opportunity to again have occasion and means to execute her artistry. That dream has kept her from being impoverished. But more fundamentally, Babette had been exercising her artistry over the years when all she had to work with was dried cod. Her artistry, muted and hemmed in as it has been by external constraints, has filled the soup buckets for the poor with a new “mysterious power to stimulate and strengthen [the village’s] sick and poor.” She has been doing her utmost all along.

In 2020, people across all nations and social strata had the shared experience of living with unfamiliar, pandemic-related constraints. For some, those constraints were minor inconveniences—wearing a mask, restricted entertainment, coping with a prevailing sense of heightened risk. For too many, those constraints meant job loss, involuntary dislocation, or diminished mental health. Understandably, some people hit the pause button on purposeful living and sought ways to numb their fear and frustration.

Whenever I have felt paralyzed by seemingly insurmountable constraints, I have reminded myself of Babette’s Feast. Babette is, of course, a fictional character. But her story reminds me of the many real people I have known who have found ways to live out their purpose despite being hemmed in. They stay prepared and alert, planting seeds of future opportunities for the full exercise of their talents. Meanwhile, they artfully use their strengths in service of their values, doing their best to be purposeful within constraints. In all circumstances, they do their utmost. I aspire to live like these real-life Babettes.

Caroline J. Simon is author of several books, including The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny and Imagination, as well as many articles and essays on topic related to virtue ethics, friendship and Christian higher education. She is Provost Emeritus of Whitworth University, in Spokane, WA.