What is enough? Part 3: meaningful work

How could there be an “enough point” with meaningful work?  Isn’t that what we all want – especially if it lifts your income as well as your spirits? Yet many activists for worthy causes burn out. We work too many hours, often in front of computer screens absorbing the indignities and outrages of our times. The pace of the problems is quickening, so the pace of our response is quickening. You could say that “A working stiff can work from sun to sun but an activist’s work is never done.” Here’s a storyabout someone who got into this overdrive in her work for change. That would be me. If you’ve read my essay Liberating Limits you’ already know what happened. I was doing too much – loving all of it but riding it like a 10-year bucking bronco – when I was diagnosed with cancer and had to slow down to the speed of healing.

I just got an email from a friend who is one of the most responsible and steadfast teachers of peaceful communication I know. She’s asking herself the question “How do I know when my work is done?”

yesterday morning i woke up with this question: how will i know when my life’s work is done? it’s been with me since, and you have come up around this question on and off. including also the question of what comes after if i indeed manage to find a way to know. then i also thought of how the way vision and mission statements are set up for non profits (in this country at least) is very situated in the paradigm of infinite growth – the vision is inherently unattainable, and the mission is to work towards the vision, so it NEVER ends! when have you heard of a non-profit declaring that its mission is accomplished and it is therefore closing its doors?

So the questions I’m addressing in the first tele-class, Discover Your Enough Point, reverberate way beyond money and stuff. “How much is enough – of anything? How do you know? And what happens after you recognize that you have enough?” applies even to pleasures, even to purpose, even to noble work. I hope you’ll join me for one of these classes.

yesterday morning i woke up with this question: how will i know when my life’s work is done? it’s been with me since, and you have come up around this question on and off. including also the question of what comes after if i indeed manage to find a way to know. then i also thought of how the way vision and mission statements are set up for non profits (in this country at least) is very situated in the paradigm of infinite growth – the vision is inherently unattainable, and the mission is to work towards the vision, so it NEVER ends! when have you heard of a non-profit declaring that its mission is accomplished and it is therefore closing its doors?

Advertisement