Live for your inner joy!

Pay attention to what Confucius had to say, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your Life.”

So, pause. Stop rushing. Know that in Life, you really have to choose only between two things: do what you love or love what you do. When you do neither is when you grieve, you struggle and you labor through each day. Please awaken to this reality that you and I have not been created to slog, to earn a living and to pine for a Life in the future. We have been created to enjoy this Lifetime and have been endowed with all that we need for this celebration called Life. We are perfect creations in our own, unique ways.

Roman Opalka was a French-born Polish painter who passed away in 2011, at 79. His claim to fame: something bizzarre from a layman's point of view. In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Opałka began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. Each new canvas, which the artist called a 'detail', took up counting where the last left off. Each 'detail' is the same size (196 x 135 cm), the dimension of his studio door in Warsaw. All details have the same title, "1965 / 1 – ∞"; the concept had no end, and the artist pledged his Life to its execution: “All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single Life.” Typically he would paint around 400 figures a day. Brush and paint never varied. His figures were roughly a centimetre tall, most made with two deliberate strokes of the brush, and allowed to fade away as his paint ran out. Over the years there were changes to the ritual. In Opałka's first details he painted white numbers onto a black background. In 1968 he changed to a grey background ‘because it's not a symbolic color, nor an emotional one’, and in 1972 he decided he would gradually lighten this grey background by adding 1 per cent more white to the ground with each passing ‘detail’. He expected to be painting virtually in white on white by the time he reached 7 777 777: “My objective is to get up to the white on white and still be alive.'” He never got to that number. But what the heck, he lived a full Life doing what he loved doing!

The reason why we don't often make the right choice to only do what we love doing is because we relate to reference points other than ourselves. Oh, what will the world say if I just painted numbers? What will I do for an income? What will happen if 10 years from now I don't like what I have chosen? Instead of torturing yourself with external reference points, instead of dying every moment that you live, live for yourself, for your inner joy! This is what they call bliss! And it’s inside you. And it is waiting for you to anchor within. Go find your bliss, start loving it and then __ you will never have to work again!