Get Dirty
Like the Golden Rule says, “do unto others once you’re certain that what you do will be well received, that you will be compensated appropriately, and after you’ve had a good nap.” Oh, wait. It doesn’t say that at all. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any quote in any wisdom literature extolling the virtues of sitting on your ass.
So why is it that our culture tends to equate holiness and virtue with inertia? When most folks are asked to describe a spiritual person, they paint a picture of a person with their eyes closed, sitting motionless in some special place far, far from the rest of the world. Waiting, it would seem, but for what I’m not certain. What I do know is that holding still is the exact opposite of growth.
More to the point, why is it that we’re in receive mode most of the time? You do your job because of what you can get out of it.
Waiting. Waiting for the payoff, waiting for somebody to tell us we can go home. Waiting for the show to come on. Waiting to graduate. Waiting to retire. Waiting, as it turns out, to die. Are we really that greedy?
Put another way, if everybody is taking all the time, how good can what we’re getting be? Maybe this is why we are willing to settle, to an increasing degree, and in an increasing number of areas of existence, for the bare minimum of what can be gotten away with.
Maybe Mark Mothersbaugh had a point.
Get out there and produce something. Make something. Screw up. Look like a dork. But let that be part of the evolutionary process. Life gets better when we give. Start by giving a shit, and see where that takes you.
