A Note from Neale...

Hello my wonderful friends...

This week let's look at the Holy Experience and your work, or chief activity.

I want to begin this exploration by telling you that your life was never meant to be about "work." Not in the way that most people use the word.

The dictionary defines work as: activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result; such activity as a means of earning income; employment; a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do.

Life was meant to be joy, joy, and more joy — all attainable with no work at all. Mind you, I did not say without effort. I said, without work.

"Effort" does not have to mean "strain" or "stress" or "difficult or unwelcome exertion." Effort can mean, simply: "energy expended." And if that energy is expended happily — as in, for instance, a loving and frolicking sexual encounter, or the making of a snowman, or the swimming of laps in a pool on a sweltering summer's day — it can be a joyful effort. It takes "effort" to swim those laps, but it does not take "work." It takes "effort" to build that snowman, but it does not take "work." It takes "effort" to make love, but it does not take "work."

Any undertaking, even if it is at a place of employment, that brings you happiness, that leaves you brimming with excitement and pleasure, can hardly be called "work."

The Holy Experience is the moment in which we realize that we are being paid to do something that we absolutely love; something that we would pay another to let us do.

Musicians often experience this. Actors and singers and dancers often do. Carpenters and bakers and artists and clothing designers often do. Real estate sales persons often do. In fact, anyone does who loves what she or he is doing.

I'll never forget my first full years in the "work-a-day world." I was 19 years old, had attended college for two years and was invited by the Dean of Men to leave the university in favor of someone who wanted to use my seat to actually learn something — which my grades had demonstrated that I clearly did not seem to care much about.

I was free! My father, who was paying for my tuition and was not too pleased with my flunking out of school, said, "Okay, son. You think you know best? You're on your own." And then I did what I had always wanted to do; something I had dreamed about doing since I was 9 years old: I got a job in radio! I became a bona fide, real live, genuine radio announcer.

I can remember my very first payday. I could not believe — really and truly, plainly and simply, could not believe — that someone was going to actually give me money for doing what I was doing!

What I was doing was sitting in front of a microphone, playing my favorite music for four hours, and talking. In later years I used to tell the joke that I had to turn around and reach behind my back to grab my check because I couldn't look my boss in the eye and take the money. I just loved what I was up to! It was, for me, so easy. It wasn't work at all.

It was right then that I experienced that I didn't have to do something that I didn't like to do, that wasn't any fun, or that I wasn't really all that good at, in order to "earn my keep."

And we will continue this discussion in our next issue.

Hugs and Love,