Cosmic Gardener – Cultivating a Life

In her book, “Not Becoming My Mother” Ruth Reichl relates advice given to her young mother in the 1930s. “You must use your most outstanding characteristics in choosing a career. Idle aptitudes cause restlessness and may detract from success and happiness.”

The antithesis of idle aptitudes may be what Barbara Marx Hubbard calls vocational arousal. Informed by the work of her colleague Abraham Maslow in the 1960s, she suggests that it occurs when you are doing chosen work and take self-rewarding action that is both “intrinsically valuable to your own growth and simultaneously of service to others”.

Most of us have experienced the often debilitating melancholy that accompanies unexpressed gifts, talents and abilities; those times that for whatever reasons our aptitudes lay fallow. Undoubtedly fewer of us are familiar with the ecstasy of vocational arousal. If we expand the concept into a framework of occupational arousal (being in right place with how we spend our time) I think we are more likely to find our bliss.

Being in right place transcends the physical. Finding alignment mentally, emotionally, psychically and spiritually helps us to reach our potential. When we are rightly aligned I believe we are motivated to make the world a better place.

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come  alive”.
~ Howard Thurman

 Be wary of idle aptitudes.