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.
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.
I get to go to work and come home with something interesting or enriching or astonishing.
I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
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