Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.
Interpretation
Finding the right job is a deep and personal journey.
This quote emphasizes that the right kind of work is not merely about earning a livelihood; it is an exploration of one's identity and purpose. When we find work that resonates with our true selves, it feels as though we are unearthing our soul, connecting our passions and values with what we do in the world.
In practice
During a career workshop, I shared this quote to inspire attendees to seek their passions.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don't do anything. I just sort of have lunch - all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.
A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.
Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
I love to be busy. I'm envious of people who are able to take their spare time and relax. All I like to do is work. Perhaps it's lingering Calvinist guilt?
I like the job. That's what I'll miss the most... I'm not sure anybody ever liked this as much as I've liked it.
A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.
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