Our work is love. The classic statement is that to love your job is to mean you will never work a day in your life. This is not work, but play. To find love, on the one side, may sometimes feel like work, but if we love our work, it will be play. If our work is to find love, and we play with that, we can love our journey to love.
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. To live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing, live your way into the answer.
- Rilke
I discovered that wonderful quote this morning on www.brainpickings.org.
We search for the answers, always. We do. We cannot stop this. It may be human nature, but it is also human that in consistent searching, we understand. This can take practice, and it does take play, and through the words of others and the understanding that we have, at this point in time, we can figure some stuff out, thankfully. In listening to great speakers of wisdom, their words can give us doors to walk through, but it is up to us to dive into them ourselves to really live the questions, and the answers.
Today I was on my way home. I was by the college and there were lots of people walking about. I thought that at some point I should come by and draw people here. Then, it came to me to stop and do it then and there. So I got off my bike, locked it up and went into the college lounge area where there was a coffee shop and many students sitting around, doing student stuff.
I sat down in a good people watching spot and took out my sketch book and writing notebook. I began to draw, but also to focus on maintaining a complete act of attention while I drew. More and more, I begin just to sit and see. I really looked and stayed alert. I drew some things and wrote a bit, but I came to dive into my awareness as a subject much more than my art. I thought about education, and what is the point of it if we don’t have love? I could be an artist. I’ve been told that I’m a talented artist by many, but what is the point of drawing if it’s not an act of complete attention? An act of actual understanding, which naturally is an act of compassion. I just can’t do anything out of reaction anymore. Even if it’s good art in the end, if I’m not completely with it while it’s occurring, there’s no point. I wouldn’t actually be learning.
So I sat there and observed. The writing and drawing at that moment turned out to be my context to get myself into presence. So I wrote a bit, then sat there, reflecting on it and applying my reflecting into the moment, digging deeper. It took some work, but over time it became play. With the truth of it, seeing that I am this conditioned being, a bundle of memory, it was fun. Over the course of my time sitting in the college, I did my work.
My work wasn’t art. It wasn’t writing. It was being attentive and aware. It was love. It was my consistent staying with my awareness and observing. Step by step, diving into my actual presence rather than the activity I was trying to do, I saw the entered the door of awareness. Although I had an objective to go draw or write, I didn’t insist on that being done and my focus was on being attentive and learning about my conditioning, my fear, my self. It was looking at fear as this foreign language, like it was an extraordinary jewel. I held it like that with my whole being. In understanding this misery, this conditioning, compassion was with me, for myself and all others. I sent metta to everyone, because my work was done. My work was love, and I left the college content.
