18. What's Your Unfinished Life Work?
18. What's Your Unfinished Life Work?
Like as in, right now
Visual bucket list
Yesterday I spoke with my mom after she got back from an eye appointment. The doc made some concerning discoveries concerning her center eye vision. Lose your center-eye vision, and you're effectively blind.
She's totally fine right now, but it's something she will want to keep an eye on (sigh) in the future.
"Is there anything I should get that might help?" she asked.
"Sunglasses and a cane."
I joked with her that she should have a bucket list of things she wants to see.
Going blind is not funny.
But it's funny to joke about.
Angels are terrifying, but they're divine messengers
I had my own run-in with potential blindness many years ago. The moral of the story is that boxing and judo are not good for me in this life.
Some stuff happened, and I had to get retinal surgery and go through repeated follow-up procedures.
Based on all the procedures, I can say that needles in the eye lost their intimidation factor for me.
MASSIVE needles? Business as usual.
I weirded everyone out because I was in good spirits through the whole thing. Why on earth would I be in good spirits when facing the possibility of losing my eyesight?
I knew I was in good hands. I also knew that whatever happened, I would be OK.
When you feel you're in good hands, any experience is a joy. There's no judgment. Life is a wonder.
But let me clarify: wonder is not always a lovely experience.
The Biblical accounts of encounters with angels always started out with the angels saying, "Don't be afraid."
I think that means angels are mind-meltingly massive beings. In such a presence, your protective instincts will only get in the way.
What's my point with all this talk of needles in the eye and angels?
The latest science has confirmed that being born means you're going to die someday. You can die at any time.
My ongoing thesis behind TMMW emphasizes the importance of people embracing their creativity to the nth degree. Inspiration makes life worth living.
When you're inspired and authentic you reflect the same in other people. This has the effect of uplifting society as a whole to live from our highest creative potential.
“Hey man, am I enlightened?”
I think it’s fair to say society is oppressive, but that’s not what holds us back the most. I think the real problem is that we get in our own way.
I'll admit: Telling someone that all they need to do is get out of their own way is:
universally applicable
extremely unhelpful
Where's the pointy end of that request? What do you mean, sir?
It's important to discern what we want in the world from what the world seems to value.
One mistake I often make is equating my own fulfillment with outer success or approval.
I have invested a lot of energy expecting other people to affirm to me that I am living my highest life expression. That’s not a worthwhile investment. It’s a drain on myself and those around me.
If you don’t know whether you’re moving toward your highest life expression, then the answer is no.
If you’re looking, then I would suggest starting with a question like “What inspires me for this chapter of my life?”
Hold the question with you and go about your life open, curious, and looking for a source of inspiration.
This does not need to be a highfalutin endeavor.
Being incarnated is a relationship between matter and consciousness. Being inspired means relating a higher truth with mundane experiences and having the capacity to communicate or bridge the two.
Once more, it's a case of “Put the oxygen mask on yourself first, and you can uplift the world.” I find I can always perform better when I can breathe.
Check all the boxes to ensure timely delivery of coffin
Last week I wrote about the intrusiveness of review culture.
“Am I good enough?”
“Did that experience fit into the right category?”
If you rely too heavily on expectations, experience loses its mystery and wonder, and you stop showing up for things are they are. You can't see the angels if all you're doing is trying to check boxes.
You can have a life where you succeed at checking all the boxes, and that life will end with you kicking the bucket. That’s not an ideal life in my book.
Checked boxes don't matter ... unless they do.
What's my unfinished life work?
I know right now, despite plenty of logic to the contrary, that the sci-fi book I’m writing is my most important "work" right now.
I discern that through my intuition, but it also reveals itself by how I internally weasel around with it.
If you're looking for where your truth is, look for areas you are constantly trying to weasel away from.
Even just now, I sat down, lit a candle, and started working on my novel.
Then I got distracted by another idea, which led to another, and now I'm writing this rather than going through final revisions of the sci-fi book.
“It's OK,” I tell myself. “I'll get to it.”
I had a year when I wrote 20 books. Most of them, as you could imagine, were vile misshapen things, monstrosities the light of day should never be subjected to.
One was Pants in the Tree, which I absolutely love. One was Writing from the Inside Out, which I think turned out well, but could have been a lot better. It’s a first draft. I was expecting more engagement from my publisher than I got. They gave it a copyedit then published. I always wished for a more collaborative experience. The publisher, MWP/Divine Arts, is great - 100% - but I know I want to offer something different for writers as I build out my own author services platform: coaching, editing, layout, design, platform building, marketing, promotion, and community building.
Stay tuned for more there.
Ignore societal standards for greatness
I write TMMW to hold a flame to the mission of "be creative." That, to me, is an alchemical process — something that happens inside — to unite the archetypal with the mundane to transform the mundane.
Doing what's right for you unites you and your efforts with others and uplifts everything.
What’s that for you? By the way, I don’t believe there is one fixed right answer. The process will change at different stages of its evolution and your own. There's no societal standard you can follow for this. No script.
If I paid attention to social standards for what I should be inspired by, then I should be a CEO or activist or fashion influencer. Writing a book is humble in comparison.
In the future we won't have books, it'll all be VR. No question. When we move into a life of immersive augmented reality, we may gain higher throughput with creative tools, but we'll lose the unique experience a book offers, just as we have already lost the collective ability to live in thriving small communities and have come to value business success as the highest good as opposed to self-transcendence.
In the ancient world, we valued most the person who could say "I and God are one" rather than "Last quarter we revolutionized revenue potential by leveraging social and qualitative metrics, poised to achieve a bolstered tenfold improvement over imaginary previous hooha."
So then what will happen if you go inside and ask yourself…
What's on your accomplishment bucket list?
I don't think these need to be outer accomplishments.
It shouldn't matter whether anyone else knows.
Of course, I want to make my sci-fi book as good as it can be. I'd like it to be a bestseller. That's not entirely up to me, but I know I can do a lot to help things in that direction.
Then I can show other authors how they can do something similar.
OK. Now, I'll eat lunch, and then I'll get back to writing.
See you next week.