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Not driven
Early today over tea I discovered this: I’m not driven anymore.
Professionally I’ve lived in the art world and academia, which harbor highly driven people. Ambition is fine with me. But there’s ambition with generosity and there’s ambition that’s everything-for-me. The latter clangs and screams in the professional worlds with which I’m most familiar: individual status, making a name for oneself, telling others how great you are by touting your publications or exhibitions or speaking engagements, asking your “colleagues” what they’re doing so that you can compare your accomplishments with theirs and come out feeling superior, though you may well end up feeling inferior.
Ambition with generosity produces a desire to help others. Because of whatever success or status has come my way, how might I make the path easier for a younger colleague? What have I learned through and about my intellectual and bodily disciplines and practices that I can give? How do I share what I know and what I continue to learn?
I’m doing my best to develop more and more generosity, and as that happens I wonder: where do I direct the skills and knowledge that I’ve accrued and the gifts and talents with which I arrived on this planet?
Sometime after I’d published Erotic Faculties, which was in 1996, my father said to me, “You’d write if you had no money.” That so moved me. I remember tears in my eyes as I told some friends about Dad’s words. He understood my love of writing and a driving passion to write. A compulsion? These days the compulsion is gone. And with it, a compulsion for “success.” That’s what I could articulate this morning.
My love of writing and performing is large, and in the here and now–this age of mine, this freedom in body and spirit, this ability to travel the planet and my own interior–and in the future that the here and now are creating, what patterns of my own and of the culture’s do I wish to change? What can open that those patterns have appeared to close or obscure? People yearn or wait for light at the end of the tunnel. I see no tunnel. I see the light. The light is peaceful. Not driven. Ahhh, Joanna, simply let the light spread.
- February 2, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, My work
- Comments 1
wouldn’t it be great if discussions like this were part of college 101 courses? i am loving this entry. true and inspiring.