The Ultimate Security: Doing What You Love
By Tama Kieves, who will be teaching UNLEASHING YOUR CALLING: Create the Work & Life You Love at Shambhala Mountain Center in May. Next week we will feature some practical benefits of doing the things you love.
Here is my dearest hope for our changing times. I hope more of us will turn our eyes away from the crumbling wreckage of conditions we knew, and turn our eyes toward what is now available. Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “The shell must break before the bird can fly.”
Many of us put our dreams on hold to take care of the “more important” matters of earning a living. Many got comfortable in the postponement fantasy of “retirement.” Someday, in utopia, over the rainbow, we’d be able to do what we’d really want. We’d grind our teeth on Mondays meanwhile, or sleepwalk through the week and collect our paycheck. I think the Universe is now saying, now or never. You didn’t come here to planet Earth to wait for your chance. This is your chance. You have more love, genius, and invincibility inside you than you realize. Do what you love now. Tap your secret advantages. Doing what you love isn’t just fun. It’s crucial.
I’m not saying you have to quit your job or abandon all attempts to support yourself. I’m saying that it would help you immensely to take things you love off the back burner and put them on the front one. Think about it. How can it be that the activity that gives you the most aliveness and fulfillment is extraneous to your life? It’s not just that you’ll enjoy the hours you spend on painting or playing chess. It’s that doing what you love changes your brain chemistry, your energy levels, and your entire outlook on life.
If you’re in a rocky situation, doing something you love, even for 30 minutes can take the edge off of everything. I don’t know about you but when I’m starving, it’s hard for me to be a civilized human being. I may not howl at people or snatch ice cream cones out of their hands like a chimpanzee, but the thought does cross my mind. Now, when I’m fed, I’m absolutely charming. I have latitude. I have manners. I think of philosophical things to say or write. I can bear to wait in line without imagining throwing someone’s cell phone out the window and twisting their head off. You see, it’s just best to feed me.
It’s the same on a soul level. If we’re not doing what feeds us most, we’re walking around starved, with secret dry grasses, and then everything seems to enflame us. One of my clients hated her job, hated every nanosecond she had to spend there. But an interesting thing happened when she started to make writing her novel a priority in her life. She noticed that on the days she wrote, she felt calmer, like she’d gotten a massage for the tension in her soul. It wasn’t that she now loved her job. But she didn’t feel as though a thief had come in through the window and stolen her most cherished goods and even hope, day after day, leaving her with debris, regret, and forms to fill out.
Oh, I hear the restless murmurs in the background already. They spit, “Are you crazy, write poetry in an economy like this? Take salsa lessons? Play video games with my grandkids?” Yes, by all means step away from your somber, limited mindset. You can always go back, if you like. But meanwhile step into the light. You were given your desire for a reason. You were given the talents you have. I wonder just how rich your life will be, once you tap your ultimate security.