Finding your life’s work
I titled this “Finding your life’s work worth” because that is exactly where I am at this point in life. Fifty four years of trying to figure it out through education, marriage(s), and wandering has brought me to this place. Where I have found, well let me not beat around the bush, nirvana.
Nirvana is an ancient Sanskrit term used to describe the profound peace of mind that is acquired with liberation, and as Janis Joplin sang many moons ago, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
The NYT had an article about our interior moral compass and how our genes play a part in our happiness. Turns out if you are primarily hedonic or are based on consuming things, you have unhealthy profiles and increased inflammation, if you are more eudaemonic or have a sense of higher purpose and service to others you have anti-body producing genes and lower levels of inflammation (and in case you were not aware inflammation is the new stress – as in buzzword for all that ails us).
What’s interesting to me is not to question why this took 54 years to be revealed because time is a linear construct, it’s to be grateful that I got back on my path. Remember, how I’ve said many times that up until I was 30 years old, I was seeking a higher purpose through my writing, but I moved out west to California and therein lost that self in a sea of “getting and spending” that transformed me into a stress ball, or in the current parlance: an inflamed tick on capitalism’s hind. In being thrown off the yellow brick road, through no due diligence of my own, I was blind, but then I saw [read: again, but this time more profoundly].
My wheelhouse is no more about getting the rich richer (despite the fact that my true aim in nearly two decades of that work was delivering truth to Wall Street), the core of my new wheelhouse is about race and parenting and how this will affect my child, affects me, and informs our society. One spoke of this wheel is my blog, another is workshops to help adoptive and foster parents become racially aware, the other is a book, and there are many other spokes manifesting as I type – in other words I am launching rockets of abundance.
I took Heidi on a long walk to City Park this morning and ran into just about everyone I knew and the last person I spoke with said, “Remember you were born under the sign of Taurus, which means you are strong and steadfast.”
My horoscope today – drumroll as these Yahoo ones are eerily on point for me:
September 11, 2013
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Today your heart is feeling generous, and it’s telling you to do things because they are the right thing to do — not because they are profitable. You are coming to understand that if you only think about financial gain before getting involved with other people, you will ultimately be selling yourself short. Acting selflessly today is very likely to create greater gain later on down the road, so don’t be shy about asking who could use a helping hand.