many people believe a curving our indirect path best describes the stories of our lives*
Peter Turchi

There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, by whether it is [relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about … .**
Marie-Louise von Franz

What would it be like if our sense of an ongoing journey and having all that we require are one and the same thing?

On the one hand, we are making our way through a story handed to us that we forget to question:

The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe
And we become converts
To the religion of stress
And adore its deity of progress,
… .^

On the other, there is a greater story waiting to be discovered within:

The source of all art is the human psyche’s primal need for the resolution of stress and discord through beauty and harmony. … Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but well-told stories have the power to harmonise what you know with what you feel.^^

Our “art” materialises when we bring our passions and competencies together:

When passion of feeling and technical brilliance come together, the beauty can be devastating and transfiguring.*^

A simple guide might be:

Low passion, love competence: leave it to someone else;
Low passion, high competence: teach others;
High passion, low competence: learn more;
High passion, high competence: do more and more.

Gapingvoid suggests:

doing what you love is the new wealth^*.

*From Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze;
**Marie-Louise von Franz, from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Citizenship;
^^From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: What Makes a Story a Work of Art?;
*^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^*From gapingvoid’s clog: The Great Reassessment.