I followed one of Euan’s threads this evening and found an older post by his friend Claire. What she says rings true for me:
The concept of work life balance is dead. If you find what you are passionate about and can do that for a living, then there is no boundary between what is work and what is life. Your work becomes your life and your life becomes your work.
I spent Friday afternoon taking in the surprisingly spacious and beautiful territory that is Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, catching up on life and work, hopelessly (hopefully?) interwined, with my friend and colleague Bliss Browne.
She had twelve hours in London, between Chicago and Johannesburg, and I got about half of them. A one-time resident of these parts, she led our tour. A few small things already blooming and daffodils poking through bravely… in January! This might be the first winter of my life I don’t see any snow.
We did a big loop in the park, stopped for lunch, and then jumped on a computer and had another blogging lesson. She’s dipping her toe in at Ubumama, the newest addition to the projects blogroll at sCNN. It’s good to link and work with friends.
i do understand what you’re saying here, jeremy. and here is my wondering now… is it that economics constrain the passion, keep it separate, keep people locked up in the struggle… or, and i don’t know the answer to this, not sure which way i’m actually playing it myself these days… or… is it our hesitation or failure to advance strongly in the directions our hearts lean that keep up in the struggles you describe. joseph campbell used to say “follow your bliss, and even if everything goes wrong, you still have your bliss.” dunno. and thanks!
I don’t know either. I like your recent post about the potential death/transformation of corporations if everyone followed their passions. It’s a great thought experiment.
It seems to me that many people don’t actually have a passion (or at least one they can articulate), and many who do can’t connect it to paying work because of a lack of creativity or clash with their other lifestyle values. Some may just not have a high tolerance for risk…maybe they don’t want to open their custom doll accessory shop while the mortgage payments are piling up for their young family. Many will choose tolerable work and a roof over their heads over bliss and no roof.
Sometimes I think of this issue in terms of the tools we have available to us. People struggling with poverty often don’t have the tools for self-actualization — gross generalization, I realize — and by tools I don’t mean intelligence. I’m thinking of networks, access to opportunities/funding, quality education, successful role models, etc.
Maslow’s hierarchy seems to be at play here — perhaps fretting about applying our passions is a particularly privileged hobby…
This post reminded my of these two quotes:
As master in the art of living you draw no distinction between your work and your play, your labor and your leisure, your mind and your body, your education and your recreation, your love and your religion. You hardly know which is which. You simply pursue your vision of excellence through whatever you are doing and leave it to others to determine if youre working or playing to yourself, youre always doing both.
James Michener
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
Arnold Toynbee
While I see the truth in the comment on the blurring between work and life when you’re pursuing your passion, I’ve been stumbling over the idea that everyone should be (and could be) doing the same with similar happy results. Not that you implied it, but I’ve seen it elsewhere recently.
I’m not sure that the dream of passionate work is attainable for the vast majority of middle-class working folk, never mind those struggling with poverty (sadly, too much of the population of the planet).
yes, and then again, how do we explain it when people who have so little and work so hard end up being so very happy? and when people with so much end up being so miserable?
euan semple mentioned today that somebody in davos, the g7 meeting, g8?, anyway, somebody was giving a talk about maybe money is the wrong way to score things. maybe there should be some other measures? hmmm….