(See Commandment #1 #2 #3 #4)
Commandment 5. Living your purpose is living your calling.
For as long as I can remember I have been having conversations about faith and creativity. The interest in these subjects seems to be just born into me, not sure why. Some people are crazy about sports. Me? I am crazy about a monk with a paintbrush.
This is the hardest commandment to write about. The topic is too large to only place some tips on a single page, but I’ll try.
Ask yourself "what is my calling?" That is a hard question to answer, lucky you get a lifetime to completely discover the answer. To live fully awake we need to have a starting place to open the doors.
This is where we get stuck. How do I start? Do I need an "epiphany moment"? Do I need change? Yes, yes you do. But it's not as hard as you may think, but you will have to think.
At this point the best correlation is the connection of faith and creativity. This is what I have been building up to with the previous commandments. There are as many levels of development with your faith as there are levels of development with your creativity. The prior commandment are the building blocks to discovering your purpose and calling in life. Commandments 1 through 4 are the tools to get you to your answer.
I am not going to ask you to meditate or journal your way to these answers but they are the fastest track. After conversations about faith and creativity my second most asked about topic is meditating and journaling. It seems that people have a love/hate relationship with them. They wish it could be fluid and natural process, but it never is. The “perfection is found is the process” is too slow for most people to make a real connection. Connection is the key word, not commitment. Here is a tip that I found useful to me: I do not care how bad I am at it, no judgment at all, all I care is that I do it. Thirty seconds or 30 minutes on the mat, I do not care if I do more. A page, a word, a line in my journal, I do not care if I do more. All that I care about is that it is something.
As for your faith, I do not care what or whom you believe in. I do not care what you create. I do not care if you ever make a dime off your work. I do not care if you ever have the pure God moment. I only care that you do something, every day.
With faith you have two choices: either sit in the congregation and accept, or seek for experimental truth. In our creative pursuits we can either be an observer or a creator. The choice is yours.
If you choose the life of sitting in the congregation and observing from the sideline then that is all you get.
We have to de-condition ourselves into discovering our purpose to living our calling. Dreaming out loud and even dreaming quietly to ourselves has been crushed by culture, community and the boxes of time we live in. Life has been divided up into the many boxes of time: work time, family time, personal time, relationship time, running around time. There is no time left to “Do The Work”. To live your purpose and find your calling you have to put in the work.
Jesus and Buddha questioned the status quo of life. Think about that. The two greatest and most enlightened people questioned their place in this world, which lead them to their life calling. It does not have to be this grand of a leap. You do not have to go out into the wilderness for forty days. But you do need to put in the work.
Do not give up on being human.
Do not let the machine think for you.
Do not concern yourself with results, concern yourself with the process.
It’s ok to fail...fail often, fail forward, enjoy the failure.
Opening yourself up to a creative practice is a road map. Opening yourself up to the idea that faith is a creative process in its most divine form is a road map to your answers.
Go do the work. Think about commandments one through four. Your purpose and calling is given to you in those answers. Go discover it. Then share it, and shout it out load on the mountain top.
Living your purpose is living your calling. You will no longer seek, but experience.
