Put some soup in a pan and heat it up, you’ve got the makings of lunch. Put a tight lid on that soup while you heat it up, and you’ve got the makings of a mess.
Take a good, smart dog – one with strong instincts – and give him lots of opportunity to express his intelligence and energy, and you’ve got a happy dog who’s a positive and productive part of your life. Keep that dog bottled up all day with no way to pour out his energy or express his intelligence, and you’ve got the makings of a mess.
You and I are souls dressed in vessels that have designed themselves in this life to be tools of expression for the creative energy and passion that comes from inside each of us. There’s a harmony between the soul within, the vessel that wraps that soul, and the path in life that we wander along. That harmony defines the shape of the expression, and the pressure to express it.
It’s a harmony that’s unique to each of us.
Like the dog who’s kept from using his instinct and intelligence in a positive manner and ends up in mischief, we can end up creating a mess in our life when we fail to keep our lives “in tuneâ€, allowing expression to flow from us in a shape and intensity that matches our design.
I’ve learned this the hard way throughout my career, as I’ve sometimes ended up in “jobs†that required less of that creative energy and passion than needed to flow out of me. Early in my career, this was sometimes a frustrating experience, as I’d continue to try and pour myself into something that just didn’t have the space or desire for it. Sometimes I was lucky, and the job could take every bit of passion and energy I could give it, but sometimes I wasn’t as lucky.
The real maturity came in understanding that the problem wasn’t with the job, or with me. The problem was when I tried to pour more of myself into something than there was capacity to take. No blame. No right. No wrong. It’s just the way of it.
I’ve grown up a bit in my jobs these days. I’ve learned to understand how much the “job†needs and wants of me, and that’s what I give. I end up with a very good and balanced relationship with my job, the people around me aren’t frustrated by me, and I’m not frustrated by the job. Life works out well.
Getting to this point required that I learn to see and feel passion and creative energy for what it is, and to find positive and productive places into which I can pour that energy and passion. Trying to slow it down or bottle it up only leads to mischief and mess. For me, the real revelation came in coming to understand that solving the problem didn’t necessarily mean leaving the job, but just coming to peace with what I could do or be within that job. I only needed to leave the job if I wasn’t willing to accept the form of the relationship that would allow the job to work in my life.
There’s a wellspring of creative energy and passion inside each of us, driven by the source of all such energy. If we look carefully at the frustrations in our lives, there’s a pretty good chance that there’s a mismatch between the output desire and the intake capacity of some expression of creative energy and passion. It might be in a relationship with a friend or lover, a job, a marriage, school, a child, or any number of other relationships that we maintain in our lives.
At the end of the day, there’s nothing we can (or should) do to stem creative energy and passion that boils out of us. To stay healthy and happy, we need to make sure we tune the relationships we’ve got in our lives so that we’re pouring into each relationship enough, but not too much, and that we’re making sure that we’re surrounding ourselves with the right sorts and numbers of outlets (relationships) to allow that energy to flow at the pace it needs to flow.
