What’s in My Blood

The man who is in Love with his trade is not a worker. He is an artist. Whether he makes a million dollars or a thousand, he is living in accordance with his nature. And thus his days are filled with joy.

The man who works “for a living” and who is not interested in what he does is a laborer. It matters not if he has a corner office, four secretaries, and a five million dollar salary. He is insulting the glory of his own creation.

The two paragraphs have been torturing me for a while because I am guilty of the stated. I work for a living and I still have the chance to pursue my passion. The two things that I love without question are writing and working out. They come naturally to me, they are just what I do. I organize my life especially in the city around these two. I have realized that when these two come up, everything else can wait. When I get the impulse to write I don’t stop lest I lose the message that wants to come forth through me. When I go to the gym I get a chance to lose myself totally and that feeling is incomparable.

This article is a silent permission I am asking myself to pursue my dreams and forego my current job. This is not the first time I have done this. It has happened a couple of times and the permission wasn’t granted. I swore to myself that if it ever comes to that I quit my current job I wouldn’t work another job, at least that I am not interested in.

The anxiety, the uneasiness that comes from me not doing my job is ceaseless, it is not that the job is stressful, it is that there is a silent push not to disappoint my employer that I can’t rationalize away. They pay me don’t they? So its only right. So in this job I justify my existence by being a mule, that is the only time the uneasiness give me a break, then I can rest till the next time I feel like I am slacking — the inevitability is that the uneasiness is coming. Even as I write this article I can feel a bit of that uneasiness because it is an infringement on my official ‘working hours’. In all honesty it seems like I do the bare minimum most of the time. I haven’t been able to maintain high performance over a long period of time. I burn out. Even through the high performance — I get filled with fear that I am going to be asked to maintain it.

My situation is this, I like who I am working with but I am uncertain if I like about the product I am working on. This is where I find myself. Sometimes I fantasize about how life would be if I didn’t have this job in my life. I see my mind calm and clear, I see my schedule flexible. I see myself travelling when I want to, I see myself living as myself — authentic. See, I know truths such as ‘I am going to die in the end anyway; that everything is on its fast lane to 0 that I might as well take a chance on what I love anyway because looking from a higher scheme there is nothing to lose or gain’ but for some reason I hold back. I am scared of that period of slump in income that might happen if my job ends now.

I embody a healthy person 100% from my eating habits, sleep patterns, working out, an honest examination of where I am at…Why the hell I am I not choosing to go down this path. It is my only chance of mastery at anything. It seems like a no brainer. The fear of truth is that truth reveals things to your sight in a vivid way you can’t unsee. It renders a continuation the same mode of existence after seeing it not it. Upon seeing truth, you will not have sustainable peace if you choose to live life the same way you did before seeing truth. You know you know so why not act accordingly. The sight of truth changes your natural allegiance to the truth and not to the other thing your allegiance would be.

This is my predicament…

Q: If I pursue fitness, writing and photography would there be anything else I would be interested in?

Q: Have I done these things for free?

Q: What lengths would you go to make these things happen?

Q: Are you helpless but to do these things?

Q: Would it answer the WTF am I doing with my life Question?

Q: Would the pursue of these things be primarily about you or about the art?

Q: Have these things been where you ran to when you were feeling lost?

Q: Are these things the ones you do in at DO IT NOW fashion or procrastination fashion?

Q: Would the doing of these things have timeline bound ideas e.g. retirement around them or come with lifelong devotion?

Q: Do the involvement in these things give you total engagement and loss of self that results in flow state or loss of the sense of time?

Observation: Every time I was away from either of these things, there was a longing to come back to them. I have always chosen my phones based primarily on camera quality, The places I have lived based on proximity to the gym, I have always been writing stories since my late teens. Your destiny has always been written.