Take down a musical instrument

One of my favourite poems and one which I’ve quoted here again and again is by Jalalud­din Rumi:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and fright­ened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin read­ing. Take down a musi­cal instrument.

Let the beauty we Love be what we do.
There are hun­dreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

I’m sud­denly struck by how lucky I am to be doing what I love to do — writ­ing non­sense — and mak­ing a liv­ing out of it. I remem­ber talk­ing about this to Bob Blumer last month when he was here pro­mot­ing his show, and just last night, mrbrown and myself were trad­ing non­sense tweets about lov­ing what we do for a living.

I can’t remem­ber exactly what Bob said about lov­ing what we do because I was too eas­ily dis­tracted by the food we were tast­ing on the tour, but mrbrown has often said some­thing to the effect of “we didn’t know bet­ter, that’s why we dropped out of school and did our own thing”.

I think we both knew bet­ter, and that’s why we’re still pur­su­ing what we love, and we’ve been damned lucky to have been rewarded along the way, mak­ing our ongo­ing jour­neys worthwhile.

It’s not as easy as say­ing, “I’d rather be doing some­thing else”, then up and leav­ing your cur­rent career. You have to be sure of that some­thing else. You have to love that some­thing else.

Once you’re sure, it’ll take you on jour­neys so reward­ing, you might end up in Sin­ga­pore mak­ing popiah skin in front of a bunch of blog­gers:

Do you love what you would rather be doing? Enough to chase it?