Do what you love? :/

On choices, work, self-love, and service

Hello! Today I’m working through some self-doubty but ultimately trusting-the-process thoughts about my life and career choices.

Sometimes I think I’ve been smart with my choices. Following my intuition, quitting that which did not serve, pursuing that which brought joy, etc. But as I get older (while I still feel 19) and my friends and peers start to specialize and make waves in their areas, I can’t help but think.. what’s my main area? There’s yoga, art, my little attempts at video, photography, at one point I even wanted to be a vegan chef, and now here I am wondering if I could be a writer too. It’s great, soul wise. Financially, not so much, gotta be honest. I feel like I’ve put all my eggs in the basket of the ‘side thing’. I can do so much in a day, but if my enterprising cousin or chacha ask me what I’ve been up to lately, I feel like talking about my personal projects holds no weight. My whole life is a series of personal projects; when am I gonna start being practical? It doesn’t help that I’m turning 25 soon and haven’t yet graduated from a degree that actually makes no sense to me.

I’d like to believe that financial independence (i.e money) will be a natural outcome and consequence of doing and making time for what is important to me; doing that work and devoting my energy to personal fulfilment. This is something bell hooks wrote too, in her book All About Love: New Visions, and because she wrote it, I took the idea more seriously:

“Today, as the Buddhist concept of ‘right livelihood’ is more widely understood, more people embrace the belief that work enhances our capacity to love. And when we work with love we create a loving working environment…

“Marsha Sinetar writes about the concept in her book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow as a way to encourage readers to take the risk of choosing work they care about and therefore learning through experience the meaning of right livelihood.”

But then…

“It is equally true that we can do what we love and money will not always follow.”

Bummer. However,

“Although this is utterly disappointing, it can also offer us the experiential awareness that doing what you love may be more important than making money….

Whenever possible, it is best to seek work we love and to avoid work we hate. But sometimes we learn what we need to avoid by doing it. Individuals who are able to be economically self-sufficient doing what they love are blessed. Their experience serves as a beacon to all of us, showing us the ways right livelihood can strengthen self-love, ensuring peace and contentment in the lives we lead beyond work.”

And also,

“Many of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being. No wonder then that we have become a nation where so many workers feel bad. Jobs depress the spirit.”

“When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.”

All of this to say, there is no ‘right’ answer - but each of us might intuitively know what ‘right livelihood’ could look like for us. I don’t want to go off into a self-admonishing spiel about my privilege in not being pressed to earn my living (just yet), but that is the case for me. I have the freedom to explore whatever inspires love and joy within me. If I didn’t, would I make time for it otherwise?

I quit my first university because it robbed me of that time and energy, and I can only say this so succinctly because of the very special gift that is hindsight. It was a ‘good school’, but I didn’t feel like I fit there, and ultimately I wasn’t a happy girl. Fast forward to when I started university again, one I take far less pride in attending, but I suddenly had way more time. That was when I found art again. I would even go so far as to call it a turning point, not in my ‘career’, but in my sense of possibility and self, which I may venture to say, is everything. And yet, when it comes to telling people what my life looks like, I harbour some shame. Some regret at having left a ‘good school’, at having not been practical, at not feeling a sense of linear progression, at realizing I could’ve been in the workforce making a nice amount of money by now had I just chugged along.

What’s more important I wonder?

So much of that sense of shame and embarassment and not-worthiness comes from, frankly, the fear of telling aunties and uncles what I’m upto. First of all, they don’t really care and will forget within 4 seconds of me telling them. Second of all, there is no second of all because it’s ridiculous that this should eat me up so much given the seldomness of such an occurrence. Once every few months maybe? Suck it up Amina.

The truth is, I’m probably perfectly happy just as things are. I could go on a whole other flex about my thoughts on happiness and what that means given my recent realization about the changing nature of feelings and giving ourselves the permission to go through it all as it comes. But maybe it comes down to two main things: needs, and values. If my most basic needs are met (for which I am so thankful), then this gives me the space to focus on the expansive, the joy-giving, the spiritual. And if my values are, to put it simply, not materialistic in nature, then my efforts will likely be directed in a direction different from most of society’s. If my values centre around well-being, that of mine and those close to me, then that’s what I’m gonna focus on. And it takes a lot of digging heels into the ground (and meditating, in whatever form) to come back to that understanding.

This is really something I have to come back to, time and time again. When I think about the future looking like this, just a series of times of losing and finding myself over and over, I’m like ugh. How exhausting. But each time the realization is a little more refined, a little more nuanced and creates a little more opening. Openness is what allows all that good stuff to flow in, and that’s what we all want I suppose.

All of this to say… it would be nice to make more money. It would be nice to have a clear-cut answer to those who ask about my life and my accomplishments. But if I was there, I might instead be realizing that it would be nice to have more time to do what I liked. And in order to feel less navel-gazey, I’ll go back to bell hooks, who first made the connection for me the relationship between work and self-love. And it makes so much sense. The love we pour into our work, to which we devote so much of our lives and time, will naturally reflect itself back to us and therefore back out into the worlds we inhabit. And that is a service! It’s not about me, at the end of the day. It’s about all of us, which is as good a reason as any to do what you love. Not in the cheesy entrepreneurial capitalist money-making way. Just do it because we love it, the rest (whatever we want the rest to look like) will follow. I hope.