What is the very first step of developing a conduit of joy in an area that’s joyless?
Patience.
What is patience?
Not falling for the perennial distractions that would have you thinking about your pleasures and pains of the past or the future in regards to this issue. Like washing dishes, doing laundry, balancing your checkbook.
See if in these areas you can first cultivate patience.
Begin to notice the invitations towards restlessness.
See if you can hear in your own mind the stories and feelings that arise, that try to distract you, that take away your attention on this present moment.
As you give your attention, see if you notice an increase in life force.
When you pay attention to what it is that you’re doing, feel the energy of that.
Years ago when I was a teenager I worked in a lamp factory. I had to spend all day assembling lamps, same job over and over again. It was a nice job for a teenager, I made a little money. I thought it would be a nice job only for a teenager because I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I said, “This is one thing I don’t want to do for the rest of my life, assemble lamps over and over and over again.”
I looked across many rows of people assembling lamps. Just on the other side of me, there was Enrique. He was an older man, didn’t come from the United States, must have been maybe sixty years old. I noticed the way he worked, and he worked the same all day long. I noticed the expression on his face was so serene, almost with a little smile, a simple expression you would call contentment. He was dressed very nicely in his work clothes, everything always neat and clean, his hair always combed, a nice sixty-year-old man.
Day after day, month after month there he stood on his feet all day, making these lamps. I had no way of expressing what I saw except dignity. This was such a dignified person. He wasn’t showing any sign whatsoever of complaint about his work. He was showing a full-hearted acceptance of his work, past the level of acceptance now already into appreciation. And I could see that on his face. I couldn’t see it on mine.
I just kept wondering, how can anybody do that for so many years and not want to quit? And he made really good lamps.
Why? Because he wasn’t fighting his life. Because this was his job in his own mind.
This is my job, and I give it my fullest attention.
You could see that he did that. He gave attention to detail. And because his attention was not on stories about other places, other times, likes and dislikes, but on his work, his work was excellent.
His work was excellent.
He was pointed out to be the model of how you should work. What your lamp should look like when it’s finished.
What perhaps he didn’t know was that his state of fully focused presence was radiating enough for me to be educated by it. He was improving his world even though he was just assembling lamps. He certainly improved my world. I remember him forty years later.
This is what happens when you and I become egoless. We’re able to do our work and stop fighting it.
Now sometimes it is appropriate to leave one job and start another, to make a correction, to exchange one thing for another, to make a constructive change. But is that decision being made exclusively from your own resistance to the situation? Or from the clarity of knowing a change is necessary?
Can you tell the difference between “time for change” and a time when you have tainted the situation with your own bias and prejudice, because you are fighting and resisting and making it bad? If you’re the kind of person who habitually sees mostly blemishes, what’s going on in your life? Without even knowing it?
But that’s what you do. It’s a human trait, not uncommon.
See if you are involved continually in complaints, criticisms, condemnations because of the resistance of saying, “I don’t want to be here, I don’t like this.”
Instead you could see the job, the situation, the relationship for what it really is. Yes or no, correct or time to move on.
Our spiritual life runs hand in hand with our ordinary life. They are not separate, but they are one thing.
It was possible for Enrique to have joy in his work.
I saw it. Each day there was really nothing new about his work. He did maybe five different lamps. And yet there was a contentment on his face, a smile.
That smile wasn’t coming from doing the lamp. The smile was from paying attention to his work without paying attention to stories or distractions.
Now that is the guide. That becomes the yardstick by which you measure your internal movements.
If you are bored and restless, if you are disturbed, angry, desirous, overheated, it means you have been easily trapped by your own mind. And it’s time to pay attention to what you are doing in this moment now. Until you can choose to focus on what you’re doing over what you’re thinking.
If you find joy in what you’re doing, then you’ll also realize you don’t need to be thinking so much. Because after all thinking is just an attempt to find joy.
And if you have found joy in a more direct way, in the true richness of the present moment, then why think so much?
Think when thinking is valuable. Plan when planning is necessary. Review the past when reviewing the past is helpful. But to become addicted to those things and to ignore life unfolding now before you – that is called mental illness.
Spiritually speaking one doesn’t even begin a spiritual awakening until the mind can recognize what it has been doing, how it has been misappropriating funds.
So we give attention to what is before us, with patience, and joy comes from deep within.
Joy pours out through us into our world.
These are Isaac’s words from Chapter 15 of Volume 4, Walking The Bridge: With Courage And Trust.