Motive Power

I have not told any­one until now, but I stopped work­ing years ago. I went back to play­ing like a kid. So why do I put in eighty plus hours per week at my many tasks? It is sim­ple. I am accom­plish­ing from dif­fer­ent motives. What I do is not like work any­more. It is more like play. The cir­cuits in the brain and the motives of the soul are like gears. You can burn them out from over-use. My “work” gear fried in my late twen­ties. I dis­cov­ered that the key to con­tin­ued energy is in a shift of par­a­digm — using other soul-gears to get the jobs of life done.

Will power has a lot of lim­i­ta­tions, which is why we go from Law to Gospel — from rules to cel­e­bra­tion. I do not know if you have noticed or not, but you can play a lot more than you can work. The solu­tion is sim­ple: turn your work into play. You will also find that by doing so you will have more energy, more cre­ativ­ity, and more love. If God is ever asked why the cre­ation came about, the answer would be some­thing like: “I was just play­ing around.” (“Work” for an infi­nite Deity must be a bit of a tongue-in-cheek expression.)

Matu­rity is about grow­ing into bet­ter motives. At first a per­son does things for recog­ni­tion and ego. That is an eas­ily exhausted frame of mind. Some­where along the way new motives are found. Altru­ism replaces the need for approval. Love of life takes over and man­i­fests itself in greater care for self and oth­ers. Doing gives way to being. (It is far eas­ier to be your role than to do your job.) Being is infi­nite, doing is merely a tem­po­rary stage presence…and very short-lived.

Cre­ativ­ity is end­less. Putting your time in on the clock is merely eight hours per day of drudgery. Go beyond what you do to who you are. When you are involved in your call­ing your money wor­ries will go away. You get lost in some­thing greater and thus you do not have to com­pen­sate with mate­r­ial indul­gences. Going to church as a duty can­not work for very long. Hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with God will last for­ever. All it takes is a shift of motive — a shift of soul-gear to a higher calling.

Find new rea­sons to do what you do and be reborn in your work, your fam­ily life, and in your spir­i­tual quests.