This is why I long so impatiently to get to work, to begin my workday, because life can become art only once it has become work.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

But originally, “amateur,” from the Latin amare, “to live,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly “dilettante,” from the Latin delectare, was someone who enjoyed a given activity.**
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

What if our joy and our work could be closer together?

We begin exploring by considering what we are doing each day.

Corita Kent writes,

The root meaning of the word art is to fit together and we all do this every day.^

We mustn’t assume we’re in the right place. Kent continues:

One of the most important parts of growing up is to see ourselves as we really are instead of assuming we are what our parent sand teachers told us we were.^

Do you know yourself, your values, talents, your most energising activities? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests:

Whether a job has variety or not ultimately depends on a person’s approach to it than on actual working conditions.**

Your values, talents and energies can be understood to comprise your “approach.” Set these free and the variety and the possibility within your present work may well appear. You may appreciate what Rainer Maria Rilke means when he says he cannot wait to get to work for there is his art.

If you have done all of these things and you haven’t found your joy and work to be close then you may want to take a closer look at what your approach is telling you about what to do next.

(*From Rainer Maria Rile’s Letters on Life.)
(**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(^From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning by Heart.)