Follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
Joseph Campbell
Shrimp Boats Is 'A Comin'
Right Livelihood
Motivational speakers
like Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer have long since borrowed the advice of Confucius,
the Buddha and Joseph Campbell about meaningful work and offered it as popular,
self-help wisdom. In fact, there was a best-selling book in 2011 by Marsha
Sinetar entitled, “Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow – discovering your
right livelihood” – a rewording of Campbell’s “follow your bliss.” The book offered to help readers discover
their calling in order to lead a fulfilling life and more than that, a life of
integrity. So it shouldn’t be surprising that 20 years earlier,
author/philosopher, Sam Keen identified “right livelihood” as the fifth heroic
virtue required of one who hopes to complete the “sacred quest” and live from
the heart.
The Buddha named right
livelihood as one of the steps in the Noble Eight Fold Path, the way to peace,
wisdom and nirvana. There are a number of elements that comprise “right
livelihood and the first is to find a way of earning a living without doing
harm to others. But it’s much deeper than that. As Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh
teaches, "To practice Right Livelihood, you have to find a way to earn
your living without transgressing your ideals of love and compassion. The way
you support yourself can be an expression of your deepest self, or it can be a
source of suffering for you and others. " ... Our vocation can nourish our
understanding and compassion, or erode them. We should be awake to the
consequences, far and near, of the way we earn our living."
The second aspect is
to find “appropriate happiness” which refers to making your living doing
something you feel good about doing. If you hate your job, you’re going to be
miserable and everyone else around you will be too. But if you are working at
something that fulfills you and at the same time makes you feel as if you are
contributing in some way to the happiness and well-being of others, then you
are clearly practicing “right livelihood.” Confucius said it so well almost
2500 years ago, “Choose a job that you love and you will never work a day in
your life.” And theoretically, if you follow your bliss by working at something
that “inflames your soul and fires your passions,” then eventually sufficient
income and success will come. (Manion, James. The Everything Philosophy Book online
at http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Everything_Philosophy_Book.html?id=2w3uGPsQWf0C)
There are a number of
additional aspects of right livelihood including that it should contribute to
our own spiritual growth too – or at least not hamper it - but for my purposes
these are enough to think about. Keen
says there is no formula for determining right and wrong livelihood but that we
“must keep the question alive.” So what does that have to do with identifying
ourselves as artists? According to Keen, we must listen to the voice of our own
being, discover what gives us our greatest joy and determine what it is we have
to give, to contribute to the betterment of others and our society. Well that’s
all well and good – follow my bliss – and if like most of us who dare to call
ourselves artists in some genre or other, my bliss is to create beautiful or
meaningful artworks, plays, poems, musical scores, etc., then what am I doing
in my current day job??? And don’t we all have to compromise that bliss just in
order to survive and meet our responsibilities?
Maybe…but maybe we can accomplish “right livelihood” by a thoughtful
consideration of how our current employment fits in with our values or whether,
like art, it is also an expression of our love, devotion and service to others
and not just a matter of money.
Keen, in his book, “Fire
in the Belly,” tells a cute little story about the conflict and contradictions
we might face in choosing “right livelihood.” He explains, “A young man came to
therapy complaining that each time he tried to take the examinations for his
Ph.D. in sociology, he got diarrhea and had to leave. The therapist asked him, “How
do you feel about becoming a professor of sociology?” “Sh..ty,” the man
replied. “Then why are you doing it?” the therapist asked. “Because my father
is a professor and has always planned for me to be a professor…” (Keen, p.169)
What the young man
really wanted to do was work in theater as a set designer but he was unsure of
whether he had the talent for it, whether he could make a living at it. But the
reality is that clearly he’d have made a lousy professor of sociology, made
himself and his students and his family miserable, and probably failed at it in
the long run. I used to have a small poster in my high school classroom that
said, “Work…is love made visible.” That’s the way I felt about teaching…I
considered it an art every bit as much as the paintings I do today and I knew
that it tapped into a fundamental joy for me in serving others through my
creativity in the classroom. The connotation of “right livelihood” today, says
Joanne Colbert, “has more to do with earning your living while being of service
to the world. And, for me, it assumes that the thing that gives you the most
joy is the way you can best be of service to the world. In fact, if something
does give you great joy, that’s a significant clue that it is the unique gift
you have to offer the world. And the world is waiting for what you have to
offer.” That’s what we mean by the word “vocation”
– not just a job but a calling.
“Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the
world’s deep need,” wrote Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner. If art is the source of your deep gladness,
what need in others is it addressing, what values important to you does it
express…how does it serve?
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