Or, why it matters that you find your greatness.
If there’s one thing that flattens the playing field amongst all humans, it’s time. We each have one life to live, to give, to dream, to learn, to grow, to overcome where we are and get to where we are going. By ‘normal’ standards, we spend a third of our day sleeping, a third of it working, which means only a third is left for living, plus weekend and vacation. We spend just a little more than a third of our lifetime actually living and doing the things we want to be doing. A third.
No matter who you are, your life has a beginning, middle, and end. No matter who you are, you experience birth and death alone (whether or not you are conscious of it) and in the middle, you experience a whole lot of things all alone too, even if you are surrounded by loving people. The experience that spontaneously springs forth due to the contact of our individual inner world with our shared outer world is unique to each of us, and ours alone, no matter how poetic or artistic we are in our attempts to explain it to someone else, no matter how closely we might feel it matches that of another.
Is this ‘blue’ to you? Some say it’s white.
You can never actually know what ‘blue’ looks like to my eyes, and I can never really know what it looks like to yours. We can only agree upon the words and feelings that we both assign to our individual experience of ‘blue’.
We all see the world differently
So why don’t we capitalise on this incredible expanse of perspectives we have in this world? Why don’t we make use of the many different ways of seeing we have access to, by giving people the tools to create their own versions of the world they envision, rather than forcing everyone to accept the way of doing things that is convenient to a few?
The sky isn’t the only wide open expanse of blue out there.
You are limitless, like the sky.
Stop playing by the rules. The rules may make you feel safe, just like pasting wallpaper on the inside of a small cage might make you feel safe. It’s not a box you’re trapped in. It’s a cage, in the shape of an apartment with belongings that makes you feel cozy, comfortable, that keeps you safe from exploring and expanding into the unknown. It’s a pot that keeps your roots and branches small and contained, that keeps you from growing into the ground and up towards the sky, limitlessly. It keeps you from becoming part of the forest, wild, spontaneous, entangled with the all the other beings out there. It keeps you comfortable, falsely secure, and numb.
Does a wall make you more comfortable? Does it make you feel safe and secure? Protected? Or is it an illusion you’re holding onto?
Real life is juicy & delicious
It’s time to get out of the pot and into the ground. Give up comfort. Give up security. Give up the illusion that is not keeping you safe from the outside world, but is depriving the world of your potential, your expanse, your contribution, your greatness.
Travel. Why do we covet it? Because it allows us to expand our wings and break out of that cage. We become free of the restrictions we have placed on ourselves in our daily ‘normal’ lives, and fly into a world that only exists in our ‘off-time’. It allows us to go beyond what we know, and it lets us dream of a reality that we are too scared to create every single day.
We can’t help but divide work and life into separate parts, after all, it’s what we’ve been taught by our parents and their parents before them. But we have the choice to change the rules. We can choose to stop wasting our life splitting your time between work and life, and looking for that mythical balance between the two. We all have one life, to live, to work, to play, to eat drink be merry with our friends. Let’s stop compromising.
There is no work-life balance, there is only life
When your work comes from living your life, being present in your existence from moment to moment, you allow the spontaneity of creativity to burst forth: be it from desire, need, or aspiration. You stop doing work and you start to make a meaningful contribution to your own life and the lives of others. You take real life into account as it’s happening, not as you imagined it sitting in your wallpaper cage. You start to allow for the “what if…” that exists beyond “what is”.
The most creative possibilities come from a mindset of abundance in what we have right now, not what we are afraid of not having tomorrow.
It starts with being present, and accepting what is, rather than avoiding it, escaping it, or wishing it was not. It starts with living, not working and living.
The real price we pay for not living
But it’s not just that you’re missing out on real creativity and real living if you don’t let go of your comfort and security. It’s worse than that:
The cowardice, the lack of courage to shine each individual light into the world is costing us all.
It isn’t just ourselves we rob, it isn’t just ourselves that we shut away from the world. When you deny your potential to make your unique contribution to the world, you are depriving everyone else from benefiting from your gift. You are depriving the world of that essential ingredient in our collective greatness, we are all unable to benefit from that thing that only you can create in the world, that will contribute to the lives of all of us, together.
For one of us to survive, all of us must thrive. We co-exist, whether we like it or not. And we can only begin to collectively evolve into our true human potential when we start to work together — which begins with seeking out, acknowledging, and developing our own natural abilities. The abilities that belong in the collective toolbox that we all share.
We share one world, and all the resources and talents that exist within it.
Collaboration, not competition
We share a planet. We share resources. We can draw lines in the ground and create different coloured pieces of paper with different monetary values to match the different colours of our bodies to separate ourselves from the ‘other’ as much as we want, but when we travel, this is what we all learn: We are all the same. There is no ‘other’. You are me and I am you. My experience belongs to you, and yours belongs to mine. We share it, and we all benefit from it.
Our only limitation is that our bodies can only be in one place at a time. So why would you want to be in a place that you want to escape? Don’t let your work keep you from your one life to experience everything, the life that you should be using to create your Life’s Work, that one contribution that only you can make, that will make the collective evolution possible.
Find your greatness, and share it
Before you go telling yourself that you have nothing great to contribute, just take a moment to consider if that idea doesn’t come from the your ego. People often believe that a lack of desire to be great means they are not egotistical. But if you are keeping your gifts to yourself, not making the effort to uncover them, and not telling the world about them, isn’t that egotistical, selfish, irresponsible?
Do you have to be called Einstein, Gandhi or Obama before you start making a worthwhile effort? Or is it up to each of us to make our contribution regardless of recognition?
Greatness is a collective effort
Greatness doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. For every one of these great names, there were hundreds, even thousands, who strived for a better way of life, for themselves and for others, and these names only became a symbol, a landmark, a milestone for the collective achievement of all those who worked their whole life to create a better way. There would be no Einstein if it were not for all the scientists that came before him. There would be no Gandhi if it were not for all the freedom fighters and peacemakers that came before him. There would be no Obama if it were not for all the pilgrims and immigrants that adapted to the new land and aspired to a way of life that was only a dream for hundreds of years.
The human race for greatness is not a competition. It is not you against me, or me against the rest of the world. The human race is, in fact, a relay race.
It is a race where I make sure that I give everything I have to give for that part of the race where I hold the baton for us all. And when I reach the next member of my race, he not only relies on me to get there as fast as I can, but he stands there ready to relieve me, to bring us to the finish line as fast as he can. We can’t win without each other, we each have to make our small contribution for us all to win.
No, it’s not each other we are competing against. We are racing against time. We are racing to the infinite finish line of our greatness, before we run out of fuel, before we run ourselves into the ground, before we run out of time to get it right, not for one of us, but for all of us. It’s up to each and every one of us to shine our light, because your unique greatness is our collective greatness. Like in any family, humanity depends on each of its members to show what we are capable of, to not shrink back into obscurity out of fear of not being worthy.
We all need you to do your life’s work
So take a moment to think about it: What are you spending your energy on? How do you fuel yourself, your work, your desires, your day to day? Are you working to live, or are you living your work? How you choose to live your life is a representation of what you stand for, what you believe in, what you choose to be. How you choose to spend your time alive is a symbol of how much you value your life time. Are you choosing to be small and contained, or do you choose to be limitless, to grow beyond what you can see today, to get tangled up with others in unexpected ways, and together, to create a forest that offers shelter, sustenance, magic, life? Are you working to build your own cage of security, or are you living your life of a few decades to really explore the edge of reality and possibility, forever expanding the boundaries of what we collectively know?
Every tree in a forest takes responsibility for itself, to grow as large as it can, as abundant as it can, offering as much more potential for life as it can. Without every tree doing its part, there can be no forest.
There can be no ecosystem. There can be no cycle of life. Every single tree matters. Every single life matters. Every single moment of living matters, whether you choose to pay attention to it or not, that’s the choice you get as a human.
There is no forest without every single tree growing as tall as it can. So don’t just spend your life working day in and day out unless you feel like that tree doing its part to build the forest. Do your life’s work. Do the work that feels like it will allow you to touch the sky.
Your life IS your work
There is no work-life balance. There is life, filled with moments of breathing, loving, seeing, feeling, thinking and doing. Those parts of your life that give you a sense of meaning, of purpose, of an inherent desire to contribute your part to the whole, that’s your work.
The parts that you spend giving, in order to justify taking, the parts that you spend producing, to balance out what you are consuming, that’s work.
Do us all a favour and don’t let yourself become numb by letting work be something you do in a cubicle, and money be something you get for that time spent in a cubicle, to spend on the thing you actually call ‘life’. Life is every single moment you are here on the planet, even when you sleep, you are alive.
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Your life is your contribution, your existence makes up the forest, your presence makes the continuity of life possible, even long after you’re gone. Every moment of this life is your work, your contribution, your experience that is part of our collective experience.
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So pay your life the respect it deserves, and let your life be your work. And your play, and your love, and your pleasure and your pain. Let your life be the meaning you seek. Let your experience of this world be the gift you give to us all. Because for all of us to thrive, each one of us must live our life to its last juicy drop, and share the magic we have experienced.
Maybe that’s how we can all be in more than one place at a time. Your experience of the world belongs to us all. Share it.
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If you’d like to collaborate with me, or get help finding & pursuing your own life’s work, please visit www.moulsari.com and send me a message. I’d love to create something great together.
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