Do Your Work

"Just do your work.  And if the world needs your work it will come and get you.  And if it doesn’t, do your work anyway.  You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink.  That is the grace I’m given.  Because when one can control things, one is limited to one’s own vision.” ~ Kiki Smith via The Noisy Plume

The past 3 weeks have been something else when it comes to my job, and yet, I know that the important part of that is that my job is not my work.My work is my reason for being, the unique approach I have, the presence and spirit I bring to the world. It's what draws people to me and it's what I would do if money wasn't an option. My work is things like writing here or in my private journals, having deep conversations and thinking a lot, but it's also holding my husband's hand, hugging a friend, cuddling my dog. It's recycling plastic and smiling at the cashier and letting someone into my traffic lane.No one is paying me for those things and yet, at the end of the day, that's how I know I'm a good person. That's how I know I tried my best. That's how I know I left a mark, however small, on the world around me. That is how I would spend my last day on Earth.Because I can't control the world. I can't even control the neighbor upstairs who has loud bro-sounding phone calls at 7am or keep my dog from chewing through a box of paper.All I can do is do my work, and again, by work, I mean be here and now, expressing myself. I learned too, a while ago, that my own (controlled) vision of how I think things "should" be is so much smaller then the amazing grandness that they can be, that they develop into when I let go. When I trust. When I give up trying to control it all.Our jobs are not our selves. Our jobs are not our work. Our jobs are not who we are in this world. Remember that. xoxo