TerrieMiller.com

When I went to hear Natalie Goldberg speak a couple of weeks ago at Copperfields, they announced another upcoming event…Thomas Moore would be speaking on his new book, A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do. When a talk with a title like that appears in your life at the same time you’ve decided to quit your job and try to figure out what your life work is, I think you’d better go.

The introduction was given by Shepherd Bliss. This was interesting to me because I keep hearing this name, either in the context of Sebastopol, or of activism, or of raising chickens. (I’ve just confirmed via the web that all of these contexts are correct…nice to see the person behind the interesting name at last!) The introduction mentioned a couple of interesting-sounding groups…the Institute of Imaginal Studies and the Numina Center for Spirituality and the Arts.

Here’s some really rough notes from Moore’s talk:

• He’d originally wanted to call the book “Opus”, from the word use in alchemy, to reflect the idea of the self and creating a life around it; the entire work. But the publishers didn’t like that.
• Had to battle to get this book published; publishers kept wanting to make it a book about getting jobs. “This is not the parachute book!”
• He feels that being connected to our past can be very helpful with finding our life work. Owning the past and making it vivid is good material for finding life work. [I am relieved to hear this, because writing memoir is something I want to do in coming months, but it hadn't been making rational sense to me to do that!] Jokes that sometimes he talks to futurists and describes himself as a “pastist”…”I do not believe in the now” [simplification; I think Moore means that when most people think of living in the "now", they think of that as a very small moment in time...a narrow, confining view]. Alchemists said you need a big pot into which you pour all of your ingredients, and our ingredients are our past, especially the failures and dead ends (he recalls image of boys pissing into the pot). He mentions Jung and how he kept going back to old material and childhood.
• Look at your parents and grandparents relationship to work and see how that influences your relationship to it.
• When we deal with others, “we have a small sense of what a person is”
• “That’s my general recommendation…don’t improve yourself.” The notion of self improvement is evidence of a belief that you’re not good enough. Love yourself instead, you don’t need to improve self. Finding life work means enlarging the self. The soul gives you your identity and your life but it is not about you.
• Marriage is not about making the marriage work (small, narrow, forcing viewpoint), but about allowing the marriage to evoke the opus. Need to make connections between all parts of our life; not about “the job”.
• Some people have a delusion that when they find it, they will really feel like somebody. But all spiritual traditions tell us that it’s really about going beyond the self. You find yourself by giving yourself over to another.
• Do your job with the attitude that it is your contribution to the world; it will change how you do your job and you will be getting closer to your life work.
• Life in the tower; Rapunzel [wow, another eye myth]…Rapunzel’s mother was craving a root vegetable. At the end of Rapunzel, life is very ordinary. Moore: what we always crave are our roots, but we sometimes think that what we want with our work is the tower. Higher and higher in the tower, more disconnected from our roots.
• Rivers as an image of the streaming torrent of life. “If there’s one problem people have, it’s being afraid of jumping into the river.” Mentions Finnegans Wake and river imagery [this book keeps coming up; guess I'll have to read it].
• Capacity to leap without knowing where you’re leaping. [ding ding ding!] Every time we say “No” to jumping in the river, we set ourselves up for some kind of neurotic behavior.
• His decision to leave before becoming a priest: he just woke up one morning and knew. It wasn’t a painful decision because he knew it was right.
• “You can do more than one thing at a time!” (In answer to a question about feeling the need to attend to the self and not do volunteering and helping others.) Need to get our of yourself, otherwise it’s a narcissistic spirituality.
• Someone asked about how to tell the tower from the river…might not know. Things sometimes reveal themselves gradually. Follow the deep desire. If you desire chocolate, pay attention to that…what is it about the chocolate? Is it the sweetness? Are you desiring sweetness in your life? Then go out and be the sweetness yourself. Expand it and see its poetry. “These desires are infinite; they are only satisfied in divine ways”.
• Deep, open conversations with others can help you sort things out.
• Audience question, “Can life work be draining like a job?” Yes, need to be refreshed. Nurses and hospice workers have needs to refresh because of toll their life work takes. He finds that nurses need to talk to each other about their experiences; may stay for hours after work just to have that chance to talk to other nurses and be able to do the difficult work they do.
• It bugs him to see what people choose to read; what they pull off the shelves in bookstores. People will be very picky about the food they put into their bodies, but when it comes to reading they’ll accept junk that doesn’t nourish them. Like someone who goes to a cafeteria and picks seven plates of jello to have for their meal.

I didn’t buy the book last night, but I probably will. I found this excerpt from the first chapter and it seems pretty spot-on.