Awakening: Do What You Love

We’re told to do what we love and that which we don’t care for to either withhold from grumbling or change it.  Yet the way our society is constructed we spend 40 hours a week doing things that don’t fulfill us.  So we spend 56 hours sleeping, 40 hours working, and 72 hours trying to balance family and the very personal.  Do we account for every minute? No. And are those 72 hours fulfilling? No. Because even with only 40 hours of work, we spend 2-4 hours outside of that each day prepping for that work day.  Which means we are actually spending an additional 10-20 hours a week commuting, packing lunches, eating lunch hastily before running back to the office, etc. No one accounts for that time. So what it comes down to is essentially 52 hours to the self.  And how do we spend that? Cleaning our clothes and home, shopping, driving kids to games or lessons, and somewhere in there we squeeze in our physical fitness routines, a book, a date with the partner, or taking lessons of our own.

Herein lies our lesson: That society is structured in such a way that we are not allowed to create our own schedules or invest our own energies how we wish. But that is just society’s order and needn’t be our own.  It is possible to rise with the morning sun without fear of running late or to fall asleep at the witching hour without anxiety of how we fill our time.

These changes may not occur over night, but they can occur.  Just like it took several decades to learn (and learn to loathe) the schedule we have created, similarly, it may take time to develop this new schedule.  Routines, ruts, and addictions of old will have to be replaced with something new.  In this new schedule, we are given freedom of our own time creation. Chances are, it will not all be solely individualized time and herein lies the beauty: For whatever space you are existing will be out of conscientious choice, not dutiful obligation. Having said that, the latter is true of even now.  So perhaps you sit slinking in your cubicle chair and want this, but cannot risk a drastic leap. Then set the new goal, make a deadline and set actionable realistic items. Then the cubicle chair is no longer a binding chain, but rather a lifeline to create for the self a life worth living.  So how do you want to life?  If you are only given those 52 hours of personal space, how do you fill it?