When you pour your soul into something, it turns a tea of boiling water into nuclear energy.
-James Altucher
In the blog posts of James Altucher, he bares himself in what he writes and comes across as very authentic. I like his turn of phrases and return to his posts to savour a few gems like the one where I found this beautiful quote above.
The quotation from the post came as I was going through a sense of lingering incompleteness about my previous post Being There and Showing Up.
What I did not emphasise enough in my previous post is, showing up and being there only begins the journey of discoveries. What gives life and force to being there is mindfulness and intensity. Invest actions and being there with positive, affirmative emotions and we attract the outcomes we want.
When I am in that state of being engaged with a person or a project with my heart, soul, mind and with my body, then everything changes. It is then that a tea of boiling water turns into nuclear energy.
In the very beautiful book, The Power of NOW, Eckhart Tolle advices us to listen with awareness, with all our being, with our body, particularly with our inner body.
I want to understand better what it means to listen with my body so, I find his book from the pile on my side table and open it. The very first words that stare at me as I open the book on a random page is the sub-heading – Transformation through the body. Eckhart Tolle’s name again crops up in Oprah and Deepak Chopra’s meditation series this morning. The coincidence strikes me and I marvel at this, but I soon dismiss the coincidence from my mind.
I find the passage in the book that caught my attention more than a year back. It is, “Feel your whole body from within, as a single field of energy. It is almost as if you were listening or reading with your whole body.”
Particularly when I am with people I love, I have come close to listening with my whole body. It may be a conversation over phone, across vast distances, yet there evolves a depth in the connection. And a sense of lightness and understanding pervades my being.
How I relate with human beings is also how I approach work and other things. Awareness and total involvement cannot be compartmentalised.
My blog posts and the moments of reflection as I write have rippled their way into my inner being, ever so slowly. Nowadays, I rarely let distractions run my life. More gets done in the office and the quality of work is much better. I am more peaceful now that I do not have the burden of having to carry the weight of my guilty conscience and unfinished tasks on my mind. Sometimes I fall, but get up again.
Last week, I consciously looked at how the distractions I allowed into my life led to mindless multitasking, rushing to accomplish more with the limited time left. Multitasking only robs quality from every job and every relationship – like water-colours bleeding on a wet paper. I came home happy whenever I accomplished anything with focus and total involvement.
What the fox said to the Little Prince in Saint Exupery’s story is the essence of relationships and any activity: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye……It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important…….”
Being immersed, with heart, helps me get into the heart of things.
Once in the heart of things, working with all my heart transforms a cup of boiling water into nuclear energy.
As I work with my heart, two things happen. The work gets transformed into a great piece of creation. And I am no more the same for I too am transformed. As my coach Colin wrote to me sometime back, this is the essential quality that I must bring into work so that work becomes play.
And, whatever I invest my time on, expands and becomes important to me.
Intelligence is knowing what to focus on fully and what to leave out of the field of my vision altogether.
After publishing this post, I remembered being mesmerized in the past by Kahlil Gibran’s words on Work. I search for it and read. His words are so very beautiful and profound.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.
Some words arranged together in a magical order have nuclear energy in them.