What I’m Grateful For: Life

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both. “ – L. P. Jacks

This quote (which is often incorrectly attributed online to both James Michener and Lao te Tzu, but actually was coined by Unitarian minister Lawrence Pearsall Jacks) is my ultimate goal for daily existence. The less I distinguish between work and play, education and recreation, learning and enjoying, the happier I am and the richer my life feels. It’s not something that happened inadvertently, but I wouldn’t say it was exactly intentional either. I read this quote in the little book, The War of Art (highly recommend it!) and I immediately saw that I could expand my definitions and my distinctions quite simply if I just kept this quote in mind. So I wrote it down a few times, committed it (roughly) to memory, and went about trying to remember it frequently.

And so, it has become real.

What I’m Reading: LOVING this book…. Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad One. You know how often you get a book that has one or two great ideas, but someone decided to write a whole book around what really should just have been an article? I’ve read a lot of those so it’s always so delightful to read a book that is JAM PACKED with insights and actionable inquiry!

A great insight popped up around page 142 – the difference between being in motion, and taking action. “Being in motion” are doing things like learning, researching, planning, putting things in your calendar. “Taking action” is BEHAVIOR THAT WILL DELIVER AN OUTCOME. Plain and simple, being in motion, while at times a prerequisite for action, will never deliver a result. For example, researching instruments, buying a guitar, watching YouTube videos, even going to a teacher, will not make you a guitarist. ONLY PLAYING THE GUITAR will create that outcome.

However, our minds are terribly afraid of failure. So it is always easier to just “be in motion” than to take real action… for the simple reason that we can’t fail at being in motion. “Generally we are in motion because it allows us to feel like we are making progress without running the risk of failure.”

How are you in action in your life, and how are you merely ‘being in motion’ where actually, you really want an outcome?

What I’m Pondering: In case you missed it up at the top….

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both. ” – L. P. Jacks