“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” - Albert Einstein
In between our being and doing, lies the clarity we seek, the purpose each has within, no exceptions. Starting new things, trying each day creates the path to knowing. Quiet contemplation allows for being to do its work, for unknowing to enter. If you’re stuck, start doing. If you’re caught in too much doing, go back to being, to a deeper consciousness, to the longing.
“It is not surprising, then, that though we feel intermittently gifted, our gifts are ever-present. For if enlightenment stems from clarity of being, then talent is no more than a clarity of doing, an embodied moment where spirit and hand are one. The chief obstacle to talent, then, is a lapse in being. It is not that people have no talent, but we lack the clarity to uncover what it is and how it works.
Talent, it seems, is energy waiting to be released through an honest involvement in life. But so many of us check whether we have power with the main switch off-the switch being risk, curiosity, passion, and love.
With this in mind, happiness can simple be described as the satisfaction we feel when we are in ultimate accord, however briefly, in being and doing. In those unified moments, our purpose is life and our talent is living in its most immediate detail, be it drying the dishes or raking the leaves or washing the baby’s hair.
So when I can’t find my purpose, I beg myself to sit in a field in the sun watching ants in hopes that I will meet my clarity. When I am convinced I have no gifts at all, I implore myself to search for the switch, to try something out of view, to gamble on what is remotely calling.” – Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening