Yourself

"Your work is to discover your work and to give yourself to it."

I've been thinking about this quote a lot lately. Like many people, I'm a cubicle farmer. My daily work is rather dull and uninteresting. I'm great at what I do. It's just dull and uninteresting. And it takes very little of my time, hence the time to spend in self discovery and to write this blog.

Most children do not grow up thinking: "I want to be a middle manager for a faceless corporation when I grow up." When I was growing up, we wanted to be astronauts and baseball players and firemen. The fact is, most of us cannot be those things, and many of us wouldn't want to if we understood what those jobs really involved.

Lately I have been trying to figure out what my "work" really is.  My job enables me to have a comfortable income and spend time doing things I enjoy, but it is by no means my passion. Is this enough? Is it better to have a job you love, but that distracts you from paying attention to other aspects of your life? I think not.

I think my "work" is about being a mindful, compassionate person whose actions improve the lives of those around me. This is separate from my job, which is to sit a cubicle and deal with the corporate mindfuck that tells me I'm invaluable and expendable at the same time.

Each of us has to figure out what their "work" is and to not confuse it with their job. It's not to say that they cannot be the same thing and one day, maybe it will work out that way, but our "work" is something bigger than our source of income.