Follow Your Bliss

I went out for my walk at lunch (it was actually supposed to be a run, but, well... you know) and as I was tripping lightly down the road, I began contemplating all the things I had put down in the previous post.

What came to my mind was the reminder of Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell discussing purpose and how to find your true calling.

"Follow Your Bliss." (You can find it about 35 minutes in on the video above).

This has never meant what so many people have taken it to mean... namely, some sort of sophisticated attempt at "Do Whatcha Wanna!." It is instead a challenge to look at what you love; seek out what truly moves you, follow the tastes and the tantalizations that your psyche has thrown out at you for your entire life.

What is your soul calling you to?

What captured my imagination as I was walking along was the intermittent joy, the tiny giggle, and the outright joyous laughter that can come upon me at any given time when I am "in the zone."

And so I had this thought... What if I were to only do what truly made me happy?

I know that at first blush this sounds like the most selfish, self-involved proposal that anyone could suggest. But what if it's not that?

What filled my mind, in considering all the things I wrote about in the previous post, was a very simple question.

What if you only did what makes you happy?

Now there are two ways to look at this:

1) What you are doing is genuinely exactly what you want to do right now and it is at the center of what you love (your bliss)... No brainer... It makes you happy. Do it.

2) I really do not like this, it's not something I want to do and it definitely does not make me happy.

If the answer to the specific question/activity is #2 then things get interesting.

1) You can give it up.. simply choose not to do it. The consequences of this behavior could range from doing something else, taking an afternoon off, to quitting (or being fired from) your job (or divorced from your family).

2) You can delegate and send the task to someone else. You may worry about how THAT person feels about it, but it may be (I'm not fully committed to this answer, but it's interesting) that it then becomes their question to ask.

3) You can CHOOSE to find joy in the task because the task is necessary for the goal of achieving something that DOES make you happy (more money, a better relationship, a healthy child, a better world).

4) You can turn it into something that makes you happy because happy is better than angry and there's no other way out.

What I want to propose, as irresponsible as it may be, is that if, for whatever reason, we find a way to make everything we do a joy... a CHOICE for joy... it will transform all we do and it will transform each of our lives and the world as we know it.

So I've decided to add this to the remaining month of my six week program.

If I can't find joy in a task, by one way or another, then I am not going to do it.

What might happen then?

It's entirely possible that this is utter bullshit and the end result of such thinking is a complete meltdown of life as we know it.

I don't know... but right now, it's 5 o'clock somew... actually, it's 5 o'clock right here.