Daily Soul Retreat at SoulfulLiving.com - Issue 334: The Power of Passionate Work by Gregg Levoy

The Power of Passionate Work
by Gregg Levoy

I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20's, and after working there for a the better part of a decade, I reached a threshold--the word in this case having a double meaning as both a point of transition and a measurement of my tolerance for pain. At this threshold I began hearing a calling to quit my job and become a freelance writer, a decision that's not exactly designed to reassure your parents, and one that I couldn't bring myself to make for years anyway, though the gods were drumming their fingers, and though I was slowly overripening and rotting on the vine.

Like most people, however, I will not follow a calling until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, though I am routinely appalled at how high a threshold I have for this quality of pain. But eventually the prospect of emotional and even financial turmoil, the disapproval of others, and the various conniptions of change seemed preferable to the psychological death I was experiencing by staying put--at which point I followed a bit of cowboy wisdom: when your horse dies, get off!

Still, like anyone who chooses passion over security, I was plagued by the fear that scares away sleep. And it wasn't that I finally overcame the fear. It was that something else became more important than the fear. I still sweated through leaving behind a regular paycheck, medical benefits, a pension coming in two years, the prestige of being a big fish in a good-sized pond, and that wonderful organizational budget that can take up the slack created by almost any amount of individual goofing off: clock-watching, coming in to work late and leaving early, extra-long lunches, indiscriminate wastes of supplies, and those sick days I came back from with a tan. These are standard behaviors exhibited by people who feel about their jobs the way they felt about their senior year in high school: psychologically out-the-door, but punching in Monday through Friday just to collect the diploma...

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© Copyright Gregg Levoy. This article was originally
published at our website, SoulfulLiving.com, in May 2000,
as part of Soulful Living's "The Soul at Work" Issue.

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