Do What You Love

as you love what you do

I begin with the belief that however virtuous and self-disciplined I may become, I will still be somewhat resistant to good advice. I am in charge here and I write my own philosophy, says my well-devloped ego, deliberately forgetting the excellent library of famous books I have read on the arts, on philosophy, on various religions and spiritual disciplines and methods which I have consumed and which influenced me from the age of seven. It’s extremely rare that a mawkish ‘how to live your life’ piece of homespun, everyperson, take-way philosophy animates any response in me except mute or delete, if not to completely ignore it in the first place.

Except line seven, which, as I scanned the new Google search +AI shopping basket, ready to lose forever the person responsible for affronting my sensibilities, this struck me as so very obvious as to be relevant to my own situation:

If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.

Well, of course. My recent (January 2025) dream showed me that love would arise naturally from working alongside someone. In the dream, we were on the job (it wasn’t clear what job) and just fell in step, because that’s what you do, moving around together, doing practical, helpful stuff… what I loved about that on reflection was how mundane it was. No cupid moment, no revelation, no hornmonal zing, nor delight in a smile; it was just natural power, quiet, inexorable growth, like a blade of grass pushing up through concrete.

I don’t have to believe this, nor do I choose to believe it. It’s pre-logic. But, it has guided many of my decisions since that ancient time when I had a few ideas of my own about love and all its versions. Thinking about it today, my early stage concepts guided quite a lot of my spontaneous actions.

I’m not always a patient person. I hadn’t even read the rest of the poster - which was on the wall of an Icelandic hotel, apparently - until reading the notes I jotted down to write this.

I just knew I had to write about this subject, Love. To condense this beyond the lyrical: love is caused by a natural combination of energies that coincide and coalesce when the conditions are right.

Perhaps regardless of both my increased awareness, and this minor revelation that my spontaneous tendencies are always going to dominate my love life (if a “love life” exists) much like my career, which doesn’t exist except in glorified descriptions of scattered achievements. But, I did write about it, One Way Journey, in Egypt, in an exercise book, which became a novella.

I realised I had had just dreamt my own book.

An excerpt:

I slept ten long, beautiful, Christmas hours...

...and I had the most remarkable dream.

In my dream, as if real, I experienced the wonderful, precious moments of the early discovery of another soul. All throughout the dream, which seemed to last many hours, there was a sense of steadily growing intimacy with the most delightful woman, who wasn't anyone I knew, though she slightly resembled Katya. It could have been her sister. She had something of the same physical ease.

As she and I walked and talked and sat with each other, our bodies and minds slowly synchronised, finding one another just perfect in every way. She was kind, graceful, earnest and had something else too, which impressed me - a dedication to her cause, which in the dream, we shared. It had brought us together, and so we both had the same aims.

We were at a conference, and I was organising music, or performance of some kind. Everyone around us was busy - there was a feeling of unity of purpose, greater than you'd get at a trade fair, not as manic as a political convention. There were stalls, and banners. It felt completely natural to be helping one another.

Hours passed in the achievement of joint tasks. Absorbed, we moved and interacted, and I rejoiced in our mutual concentration, loving her demeanour, the graceful swing of her feminine hips, buoyed by the quiet, certain knowledge that we were coming together effortlessly, without any pursuit, conquest or demand.

In the north they like to dispense good advice for guests.

I will try to remember some of it.