‘You’re best work isn’t nothing, it’s the heart of what you have to offer.  Finding the long, difficult way is worth the journey, because it’s the best way to get what you deserve.’*

Just in the last week, in my dreamwhispering conversations, I’ve had three people remark on how it’s really difficult to dig deeper into what they love to do and how they to it.  Their talents and passions and experiences which make it possible to contribute  the remarkable thing they do.  They weren’t complaining, only observing.

It is difficult.   But not impossible.

Some of this difficulty is in having to notice the small things, which have greater significance than we often allow:  It’s easier to look at ourselves generally, but as Peter Altenberg has cause to be reported in a Paris Review article on flanering:

“Little things in life supplant the “great events.”**

These things, once noticed and developed, are the reasons we can reply to someone who asks, “What are you up to?” with “Something remarkable,” rather than “Nothing much.”

Interestingly, Henry David Thoreau would see this occurring in our lives as personal emancipation:

‘Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.  What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines or rather indicates, his fate.  Self emancipation when on the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination – what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?’^

Here are three questions you may want to play with over the next few days.  They’re not easy and they’re not general:

What does it mean to me to be Human?
In the light of my answer, who am I?
Therefore, what is my work?

(*From Seth Godin’s blog Money for nothing.)
(**Peter Altenberg, quoted in the Paris Review article Radical Flaneuserie.)
(^From Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.)