Do What You Love, and Love What You Do

In my "Layers of Learning" post (October 9,) I shared that my year-end/year-beginning reflective time this year had not led to any major Aha! moments, but instead kept presenting lessons that I have already been working on for years, only in different forms.  Every time I would bump into a lesson and examine it, I would almost always see familiarity.  "Oh, that again!"  This week I'd like to explore the three big lessons that I will continue to focus on this year. 

"Do What You Love, and Love What You Do" may actually be two, but they seem to fit together so I am going to consider them as one. 

"Do What You Love" has haunted me for some time.  I love writing.  I love dancing.  Right after those two come cooking tasty and healthy food and watching movies.  I am actually much better about the cooking and watching movies than my core loves of writing and dancing.  Perhaps that is because I need to eat every day, and I want to eat healthfully.  In a lot of ways, I've let cooking become a survival activity rather than a passion.

The difference in how I approach what I love ties to the "Love What You Do" part of the lesson.  Over the weekend, I watched a movie (twice) about a chef who really was passionate about his cooking.  In the movie, we see him growing and harvesting his own vegetables and herbs and deriving great pleasure in "listening to his heart" as he cooked.  At one point, viewers see him mentoring an aspiring chef by blind-folding her so that she will learn to listen to her inner knowing about food.

Too often, my cooking has fallen into an auto-pilot activity rather than being something I approach with the passion of the movie chef.  It wasn't always so.  There was a time when I approached cooking as a dance, engaging with the food I was preparing with great joy.  I still enjoy going to the Farmers' Market around the corner on Saturday morning, but rarely do I stop and drink in the sights and smells and let my imagination run wild the way I used to do.  I recall a time when I would walk out on my deck with a bowl and grab hands-full of fresh herbs, which I'd use to make up recipes. 

It's been way too long since I had a relationship with the food I prepare.  I blame time, but when I am honest with myself, I know that it doesn't take appreciatively longer time to engage and really experience the love of what I am doing than it does to do the same activity mindlessly.  The difference isn't time.  The difference is consciousness and intention.   I bring the intention to be really awake to my passion for the activity, and then I am conscious of doing so.

What else is true is that when I bring that intention and consciousness to my efforts in the kitchen, my whole being changes.  I am physically relaxed.  I am spiritually engaged.  I am joyful. I am creative. My activities are easy, effortless, and enjoyable--in a "flow" state when I lose track of time and everything else.  When I consume the products of effortless labor, I truly en-joy them...I am in joy with what I eat.  Until I face the dirty pots and pans, all lines are blurred into a single oneness of being.  (Even clean-up is less onerous when I allow myself to flow to it.)

Although I watch a lot of movies, the same thing might be said of how I experience them any more.  More often than not, the movie comes at the end of a very long day, and watching a movie is a passive activity to keep my exhausted body awake until a respectable hour for an adult to go to sleep.  I don't really engage with the movie most of the time.

Saturday I joined in a ritual movie event with two friends who also love movies.  Every couple of months, the screenwriter in our trio picks two classic films for us to watch.  In the middle, we usually take a walk and cook/eat together.  I was conscious this time about how different it is when I participate in these conscious-viewing events than the passive consuming, which has become my norm.  As with cooking, I will bring more attention and intention to my passion for movies in the future.  I will not only do what I love, but I will consciously bring love to the movies I watch.

I hesitate to call the other two things that I love "activities." Each is at the core of my being.  I've had the conversation with people in the dance community before that there are "dancers," and there are "people who dance."  "People who dance" can take it or leave it.  They could as easily go bowling or play tennis if they were in a relationship with someone who enjoys those activities. 

"Dancers," by contrast, are one with dance. They could more easily give up breathing than dance.  Dancing almost instantly takes them into a "flow" state where the dimensions of time and space drop away.  I've had evenings when I had a good partner(s), good music, and a good floor, when the time for the "last waltz" was announced, and I felt as if I'd just arrived.  I had totally lost track of time.  Once I danced for seven hours straight, and it felt like a flash.

There are often moments of "other worldliness" to a single dance, too, when the partners will just look at each other at the end of the dance because they know something magical just happened. (This is not a romantic thing; it is a dance thing.  I really don't know how else to describe it.)

Similarly with writing: it is who I am. I carry a knot on the second finger of my right hand from writing since I could hold a pencil. When I sit and get in the flow, it just comes.  I lose track of time and bodily needs, often going hours without food, water, or elimination.  I just don't notice.  I wrote The Game Called Life in five days, one day writing 32 pages.  I really don't know how I did it.  As with the "other worldliness" of the magical dance, I always feel like I am one with some divine force within me when I write. 

There are excuses why I have not been writing and dancing much recently.  I could blame the long hours at work, but that is getting lame. I know that I've been unconsciously choosing work over my passions.  My colleagues with families leave work earlier to be with what they love, but until now, I've not made it my intention to put what I love first.  I have other excuses, too, but they all boil down to being conscious of my intentions and then acting on them to assure that I do what I love.

A third dimension of loving what I do and doing what I love looms for me.  It involves the actual work I do.  Organization development is a wide field.  Some parts of it I really love.  Others, not so much. Some parts of the profession that I used to really love have burned me out.  Call it compassion fatigue.  What used to flip my switches now sends me into a semi-fetal position at my desk.

When I had my own business, I made a conscious decision to turn away work that I didn't enjoy.  As an employee consultant, that is a luxury I no longer have.  I do what I am assigned to do. "We all have to do things we don't enjoy," I am told.  I have expressed my desires, but mostly they have been disregarded.  I need to either learn to love the "not-so-much" stuff and do it with love, or I need to find another way to earn a living that allows me to do what I love. Maybe both.

As you can see, the Universe has left me a lot of room to grow myself this year in "Do What You Love, and Love What You Do," and at its essence that lesson is to be intentional and then be conscious of how I live my life.  I should be "in love" all the time. That is how we are intended to be. At that point, I believe I've segued from spiritual lessons to life purpose. 

Friday I Skyped with a friend in Canada, and I said to him that this was going to be a year of intense personal growth.  He asked me how I knew.  "The lessons I am working on this year are at the very core of who I am," I said. 

While I am certain that I will pass through these lessons more times in what I expect to be a long life, I am confident that if I embrace them this year they will profoundly impact the rest of my life, bringing joy and resilience to my days.  I feel like if I can "get it" this time, I may be in a position to really do the transformational work with others that I am here to do.  While humbling, the prospect is exciting...and terrifying.

I recall the words of an executive that I coached 20 years ago.  They resonated such truth that they are always with me.  She said that she had become convinced that when we were on our uniquely defined, divine path that we would simultaneously feel unabated joy and sheer terror.  As I embrace this year's lessons, they foreshadow just such a spot in my life. 

Layers of Learning

I can remember having moments when I was teaching at the university when I would find words spilling out of my mouth, and in that very moment I would have the thought, "Oh, that's what that means."  Generally, it would be something I'd thought I'd known and understood for 10, 20, or maybe even 25 years. All of the sudden in that moment in how it came out, I understood what I thought I'd known for a very long time in a different way.  I got it! Differently.

That has happened in books that I've written too.  Almost every time I reread one of my books or even part of one, there will be a moment when I will think to myself (and occasionally even exclaim out loud) "I didn't know I knew that then."  I had known it, but just on a whole different level.

Those who have been reading this blog for a while will know that there are certain themes that repeat themselves.  I believe what is happening is that I discover something different about each spiritual lesson every time I write about it.  In The Game Called Life I say that each of us comes into this life with certain lessons that we have to learn, and learning them is one of three purposes of our lives.  (The other two are performing service and developing/using our gifts and talents.)

I am quite certain that the recurring themes in this blog are lessons that I have to live and learn in this lifetime.  However, I also believe that humankind periodically needs to evolve itself spiritually, and in order to do so, many of us, who are working on the same lesson(s), choose to come and work on the same lessons in parallel.  As we master the nuances of the same lessons, we collectively evolve our world. 

I've been taking an autumn/new year retreat for about 20 years, more or less.  I didn't know when I did it the first time that it would be the first time and not a solitary occurrence, so I can't be more precise. I've been taking several days in silent reflection for longer than that, but I don't really know when I fell into a twice-a-year, fall and spring rhythm. 

For the first few times (10, or maybe 15 or 20) there would be major Aha! moments.  I would really experience on a deep and profound level something about myself that I don't think I'd ever known, or if I did, I certainly hadn't understood the impact.  I like to say, "We can't not know what we know." After those early retreats, my learnings literally shook the foundations of how I lived my life, immediately and profoundly so.

In more recent retreats, the learning has been much like the aspects of Organizational Behavior that I used to share with my university students: something bubbles up that I've known for a long time, but I just understand it in a different way.  "Oh, that again," I will say to myself.  Inevitably, it is one of my enduring lessons, popping up in a new form. 

During my recent pilgrimage in Greece, I kept bumping into the same lessons that I've struggled over and again to integrate into my life. Each time I did, I'd be a bit irritated at myself that I've been working on something years, and even decades, and I still don't have it. I guess that is why they are life lessons and not this week lessons. I don't know why I had to go to Greece to learn them...again. Maybe my lesson is that I can't run away from them.  They also showed up in different forms, but certainly not different enough that I didn't recognize them and feel the sting of on-going learning.

My three intentions for the year ahead are to open my heart, be vulnerable, and create connection.  I am not 100% sure, but I am pretty confident that they are all the same.  Over the next few days, I will share the lessons which I will need to master in order to accomplish those intentions.  There will be similarity to other postings, since these represent layers of learning for me. 

However, if I were to summarize what I think will be different this time, I would say there are two things.  First is that I've been attempting my lessons unilaterally.  That means, I am trying to do it all by myself.  These are all lessons that can only be learned in relationship with others and with particular others.  I can't create connection with someone who isn't equally committed to creating connection.  To attempt to do so is insanity.  What comes to mind is the often quoted definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The second aspect that I believe will be different has to do with complexity.  The lessons are inter-related, and mastering each has impacts on the other two...and others as well.

Celebrating Presence

In the middle of the chaos that is my work life, I just stopped the other day.  I have no idea what made me do it, unless, of course, reducing my hours significantly allowed me to actually be conscious in my life.  Actually, that is what stopped me.  I suddenly realized that in the chaos, my mind couldn't drift anywhere.  I had to be totally present.

As I thought about it, I smiled and a sense of peace washed over me.  I have struggled to be present, and I have to admit that my mind does buzz more than a bit when I am not in the chaos.  But, what a miracle to notice that the chaos actually forced me to be present. 

I move through the day going from client meeting to client meeting and coaching sessions with a little instructional design and functionary work sandwiched in.  I could not do my job if I couldn't totally let every little thing that was going on in my work just fall away so I could lend my total attention to the person/people in front of me in that moment.

While it seems a little thing, for me the realization was huge.  I believe I've quoted spiritual teacher Carolyn Myss before, but please allow me to repeat.  Myss has said our biggest spiritual challenge is to be present.  At the end of many days, they just feel like a blur, but I now know that, moment by moment, I was actually almost totally present. 

What is odd about this is that I've been thinking the chaos was what was keeping me from being present, and now I discover it is just the opposite: in order to do what I need to do, I must transcend everything else and focus on what is before me. 

I feel like skipping, doing a happy dance, and screaming to the world, "I just discovered I can be present."

Now the question that I am sitting with is: "Was this the purpose for this chaos?"  Did I need this craziness to learn how to let everything but what I am doing in that moment just drop away? And, now that I know how to do it, can I do it without the chaos?  Those questions linger, but for now, I am celebrating this remarkable discovery.