This has been a big week. I have a day job that affords me the ability to take creative risks. I concluded my service with an organization that was important to me this past Friday.
I have been making music for a long time. Four years ago, I started taking a photo and writing a haiku. I thought it was just to keep myself creating when things in work and life got busy.
It became something more.
The more I did it, the more I realized how much I loved having a way to think about what I was actually thinking about.
Pretty soon, I was inviting other people to write songs based on a photo and haiku. (You can hear these songs on the Haiku Milieu YouTube channel.)
I thought Haiku Milieu was about creativity and collaboration with each other and the world around us.
Now, I think it’s about epiphanies.
Epiphanies have these things in common:
- they come from out of the blue;
- they are fleeting, bringing a keen sense of aliveness;
- you know what you did not know prior to that moment, and you can’t go back to living life the ordinary way;
- there’s a sense of being given a gift you did nothing to get.
Epiphanies bring us powerfully into the present moment, yet often only in retrospect do we understand that everything we’d done up to that point was preparing us for the epiphany.
You might be expecting me to say “what came before doesn’t matter – only the epiphany matters.”
But that would be the same as saying WE don’t matter, only what we produce matters.
The truth is, we matter. Everything we do, and the way we do it, matters.
If you’re lucky enough to have any kind of job, whether you call it your day job or your creative work; whether you’re doing something you enjoy, don’t enjoy or are merely good at…you know you make a difference. You know you matter.
Because whatever it is that you make happen, wouldn’t happen without you.
Things are changing, in a world on fire. The good news is, where there’s fire, there’s sparks.
Epiphanies are sparks: fleeting, unplannable, little gifts that either dissolve into thin air, or go on to start another fire.
The role of the epiphany is to renew our knowing, and make it impossible to live the ordinary life in the ordinary way.
As I move from one job to the next, my epiphany is simply this: you, me, all of us, we matter. How we spend our time, is how we spend our lives. And it matters.