‘Intolerable it is not to be in contact with God and therefore when I’m not writing I’m extremely unhappy.’
British musician and composer, John Taverner, who died last year, said this. For him, composing music was a conversation with God. I believe that this is why any of us do what we do. If a painter paints a picture of a mountain, the mountain doesn’t need the painter, but the painter needs to express the spirit that the sight of the mountain speaks to in him. A writer doesn’t change the world when she tells a story. She is expressing the creative spirit within her and in what she sees around her in the process of telling her tale. When you do any work you love to do, you are expressing the spirit of creation you come from and that you were born to express. This, I believe, is what it means to be in conversation with God.
So how do we find this work?
First, pay attention to yourself. Give yourself a licence to explore pleasure, the things that make you feel good. In the matter of finding happiness, your body has intelligence that your logical mind may not. The work you love to do needs to include the actions or the places or the people or the materials that make you FEEL good. Don’t be judgemental about it. Just build up a list of things you love to do. Then look around for someone who makes a living out of doing just that. As a very wise man once said ’There’s someone on this planet who makes living from just about anything you can think of.’
When you think you know what makes you happy and can imagine a way of making it you life, there’s something else to remember, like a motto or a mantra. “Don’t wait until you’re ready. You never will be ready enough. Just start now and learn on the job.”
Fear of beginning, of not knowing enough, can hold people back for a lifetime. Only a few of us are so driven by a passion that nothing else will do. The rest of us make compromises, mostly through fear.
If this has been holding you back you might be interested in the day courses I am running this summer in London and Kent. See Events. But whatever it is you decide to do the only way to achieve your dreams is to begin, trusting what you know and letting the experience teach you.
Happy new year!