Give a man a match and he’ll be warm for a night, set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.
~Jed McKenna, The Theory of Everything
Have you ever been “On Fire?”
I don’t mean it in the literal way as in, as in being engulfed in a blaze. I mean it in the sense of, Have you ever felt that conviction that something had a higher purpose for you and you felt compelled to pursue this dream or vision you had?
Emmett Fox called it “your Heart’s Desire.” It’s more often referred to as “your passion.” When you’re passionate about something, it can be consuming, usually in a good way.
When you pursue your passion, you are seldom disappointed, and nothing can get in your way during that pursuit, because you are focused. Most often that focus is not on the completion, which may or may not be attainable, but on the joy it will give the individual or group you are directly or indirectly doing the work for.
I remember when I was a carpenter/contractor. Though I was building something, a room, a house, or a deck, the focus of my passion of creating something was less about the completion of the project, which of course was important to getting paid, but more about the joy the completed project would bring the client for years to come, and the look on their faces, when they saw the final result. That was my real payoff.
When I resigned from banking in 1978, I never did any job or made any career change because of money. I’m not sure I can even say that anything I’ve done since then was a job, because I loved all the things I did, and I didn’t do them for the money. I did them out of love for what I was doing, passionately creating! The money was a manifestation of the love I put into what I loved.
I guess I’ve always been “on fire.”
~revjim
