| Tuesday, November 8, 2011 |  |
| Do what you do |
 In the years that I worked in an L.A. downtown high-rise, I'd often stand by the window and look down on the freeways. Five lanes in each direction, full of cars at any hour of the day or night. Seen from above it is all so small and strange. Imagine, in those cars going south on the 101 are accountants and secretaries and human resource managers traveling one by one for an hour to go to work. And in the opposite lanes there are people traveling north for an hour in their cars in order to be accountants and secretaries and human resource managers there. Why don't the first people stay more or less where they were, to be accountants there, and the other guys do the same, and we have it covered? Seems so obvious when seen from the 13th floor.
It's a touch of insanity in these humans. They make things too complicated in the wrong places. Minds out of control. The simple thing is to do what you're here to do, where you are, right now. If you have to travel way over there, to do stuff you don't like doing, and you didn't like the journey, you're probably not doing what you're here to do. The stuff you're here to do flows. You're obviously good at it. It might involve struggles to become better, to do more, to go elsewhere, to seek and to search, but the journey there is stimulating and rewarding and it makes you feel alive. That's not something you think up or that somebody needs to suggest to you. It's right there. It's what you'd be doing if you didn't try to think up something clever to do and if you didn't try to conform to what seems to be expected of you by the society around you, despite that none of it feels quite right. By a stroke of universal genius, what you're here to do happens to be what you really, really want to do. It is not necessarily what you like doing. It is not necessarily what is easy, but it is what flows. It is that for which the next step is right here. It is that which you happen to have the ticket for. If you have to construct some complicated mental scaffolding around it, and it involves going way out of your way, it probably isn't it. Think of the world we have, seen from 13 stories above the freeway of society. Everybody's trying to be somebody else that they think is needed, somewhere else, far from home, and they're all stressed from trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the game. And then imagine the world where we each do what we're here to do, what we do well, where we are, right now. Imagine the super-fluidity of a world where all of us are in approximately the right place and we don't have to fake it. Where your mind is in alignment with your feelings and your calling. Where you do what you really want to do, and you're in the perfect place for doing it. I think one can start right here. [ Thoughts | 2011-11-08 03:20 | 7 comments | PermaLink ] More > |