Photo Credit: Edson Torres on Unsplash.com
If you do work you love with people you love serving a vision that you love you are lucky. Not everyone is so lucky.
Even those of us who work for ourselves, who have taken the brave step to leave the perceived security of a 'job' and who have chosen to do something we love, can find ourselves on the treadmill of 'doing'.
Doing what needs to be done while heart, which yearns to be out surfing, or hiking, or walking the dog, or gardening or baking bread, or getting lost in a book, taking an afternoon snooze or a moment to ponder the minutae of life in the hedgerows or the sky around you is well..........left wondering when it gets to be in life.
William Whitecloud, in The Magician's Way speaks eloquently about what it means to 'have' a heart - "Having a heart means you have an essential nature and that, further more, you want to express and experience that nature. You want to indulge your nature. That is your passion. You want to live from your own inner spark and connect with and enjoy the spark in others."
When I put what needs to be done above my own inner spark I leave my heart at the door. Not intentionally of course.
I rationalise there is space for my heart at weekends, evenings and holidays; work isn't the place for heart, heart will be bored, heart, like the boisterous pet, will be disruptive, wayward, take me off track. Just this once I
This is the thin edge of the wedge that then becomes the status quo.
I recognise this tendency now - like the trolley with the squeaky wheel - there is a part of me that stubbornly, defiantly pulls me away from that fullest expression of myself.
Imperceptibly, my spark flickers and fades, passion is no longer alive, vibrant, dynamic. It is lack lustre, it is work. The job that I thought I had left I have recreated all over again.
My heart is what I love and it isn't enough to have part time custody - it grieves me and that grief spills over into my service; then I work by rote, draining the blood and the life force out of my creations.
So I purposefully consciously choose to bring my heart to work, to foster spaces for heart centred business, for heart led connections and for intimacy at work.
The most important secret is that we all have a heart and that when we listen to our hearts and the hearts of others we and have the potential to spark connections and possibilities beyond our workaday imaginations.