Follow Your Bliss.

There is a difference between a job, a career, a vocation, and an avocation.

A job is something that is disposable and that can be gotten on a moment's notice. These suck.

A career is like a job but, you stick with it forever and usually carries the connotation of requiring specialized training and isn't something you necessarily love doing.

A vocation is a career that you are "called" to. It's like a responsibility. You must do it out of a sense of duty to mankind (or something like that). More often than not, it is coupled with a sense of love and happiness in the doing of it, but not always.

An avocation is something that you do for the love of it. You are compelled to do it. You love it but, you are also compelled to do it. You can't do anything else. It is both a burden and a blessing. A blessing because an avocation usually comes with the skills needed to carry out the avocation, naturally embedded in the practitioner...a burden for the same reasons.

The secret is to find a way to marry a career and an avocation or vocation.

~oOo~

"When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money."

--Oscar Wilde

~oOo~

I subscribe to Joseph Campbell's notion of "following your bliss".

"Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked."

--Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, pp. 113, 120

Sorry.