Work, Passion and Courage.

View this email in your browser.

“I’m still at the beginning”. My dear friend Gioel recently told me this realization nearing the end of her PhD and after working in field for several years. It has been a journey, and she still looks forward to a very very long, perhaps never ending journey where there would be so much more opportunity to learn, to contribute, to co-create.
Besides her never-ending excitement for life, there is something else I appreciate about that moment: She is really in this thing. This is not just skin in the game; it's soul in the game as Nassim Taleb would say.
I said to her: “I know how that feels. There is something so beautiful about the moment when we accept the full consequences of our passion.”
With that shift, our inner space becomes open, ready and welcoming. Suddenly everything comes together like magic, from the work we will do to the people we choose to be with and the purpose we will pursue. It is like being inducted into history, without the fame (at least not yet). We see with clarity and amazement the thread that runs from the distant past to the present and extends into the unknown future. The great achievement is not the finishing of something important but the realizing at a personal, bone-and-marrow level that we are part of this greater whole.
In retrospect, I was struck by the truth of my own words. It's delirious and frightening to realize that our passion, like fire, will ignite us, keep us warm and may as well burn us to ashes.
Passion is the love and the suffering of our existence. We cannot choose one without the other. Some people like burned out activists and overcommitted helpers are drown in sorrowful struggles, forgetting to appreciate how much they love what they do. Others like dreamy artists and wantrapreneurs expect superficial rewards like fame, fans and fortune without the pain and thus never get to the rich satisfaction of heartfelt work.
I have a longstanding skepticism of "passion" as an idea. It's fleeting, unpredictable and impractical. Yet for what it is worth, I admire those with courage to burned by passion and rise again, time after time, wiser, more alive.

The intimate workaholic

With that, I thought of an achievement to celebrate on this occasion: my workaholism.
A workaholic, by definition, is someone who has a compulsive need to work. It doesn't mean he loves it though, if "love" means something rather nice, light and joyous. Each of us has to define work in a way that can justify its eternal frustration. Something that is personally significant.
For me, work is nourished in the womb of life. Upon birth, work brings something important to life. Like birth, there is necessarily labor, oftentimes painful. The mechanical metaphor of “work-life balance” doesn’t serve our organic, evolving selves. (Jeff Bezos of Amazon also ditches work-life balance by the way)
In search of what work means for me, I also stumble upon David Whyte’s beautiful definition: Work, after all, is intimacy, where the self meets the world.
It clicked so well with everything I’ve been wrestling with. Work is where I need to confront my greatest fear: to be consumed by the world such as my self will disappear. I don’t think that fear will ever go away; I just need to dance with it.
Work, like close relationships, is where I learn that there is no real intimacy without vulnerability. That I didn’t learn on my past jobs. In this job domain, I haven't been a committed guy so far. Some might even say flaky. After quitting 6 internships over 4 summers, I have somewhat self-sabotaged myself from getting any job in big companies, let alone famous ones. Part of it comes from trying the agile ethos of quit fast, quit early, quit often. If it doesn’t fit, quit before getting fired, which is something I failed to do twice.
Another part comes from the contemplation that the idea of "getting a job" is frankly just too small. It didn't even exist a hundred year ago where most people had to work on the farm to feed themselves, and I doubt if it would be around a hundred year from now with well-distributed material abundance, provided that we haven’t messed up the whole earth.

Self-ignorance is bliss.

The most important reason for my fear of commitment though is the curse of self-knowledge. Once I realized I’ve accidentally opened the pandora box of self-knowledge and saw mess in there with a bunch of conflicting little me-s yelling at each of you, the more you need to take care of them - more mouths to feed so to speak. Worse, you can't cook en masse, for each mouth requires different, perhaps seemingly opposite kind of food. Sometimes the abandoned child in you may need a reassuring stability while the wanderer hungers for some getaway novelty. Sometimes the lonely warrior in you craves a deep human connection while the over-achiever thirsts for a real solitude to recharge. You must become a really resourceful chef to meet the basic needs of your own high taste existence, the least being physical, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental. It's expensive in every terms.
Is there a cheaper alternative? I don’t think so. For people who long for an undivided life of wholeness, we realize that since our work will play a big part to provide for all those selves, to find and do good work is literally a matter of survival.
It is why David Whyte wrote: "The soul rather dies in becoming itself rather than succeeds in becoming someone else's."
While I remain a bit skeptical about "soul" as an essential irreducible core or My One True Real Authentic SelfTM, I like to think of it as the ever-increasing uniqueness when an organism follows the process of differentiation.
Once we consider the soul as another mouth to feed in our inner household, the whole equation changes. The stake is high, and with it comes a kind of fierceness that draws us into an intensely personal and vulnerable conversation: what kind of work that can sustain us physically, emotionally, spiritually? It brings up a lot of fear for me: am I asking for too much? Am I too arrogant? With that much expectation, how disappointed will I be? Who cares?
My own journey of confronting such question results in this post. After all of those (mostly happy) quitting, something still stays with me as a center. If you are reading this, you know: it’s writing.

Revelation must be terrible.

After much struggle, I've recently come to a mostly terrifying conclusion: Writing is not going to be my career, Rather, the urge to write is like a terminally ill condition. I'm not proud of it; I'm proud that I manage to live with it.
It's terrifying because I know I have to do it for a long time. Perhaps it is similar to the cold feet sensation the young bridegroom has on the wedding night: “Oh God, am I really marrying this person for the rest of my life?”
For those who are feeling lost about Your Purpose In Life, here is my anti-climatic realization: sometimes not knowing what to do is not the scariest thing. Knowing it is. It is worse because after you know what it is, you've got to go for it.
”Revelation must be terrible
knowing you can
never hide your voice again." – David Whyte
Writing, or any kind of creative work, is painful, vulnerable, almost violent. Imagine how forceful the woman's womb in contracting and pushing out the baby. The commitment-phobe in me cringes upon the prospect of showing up everyday to this demanding lover called the Muse. Suddenly she's not as sexy as she once seemed.

But whatever. I fully accept the consequences of this passion. The question is no longer "can I do this?" but rather "how do I stay with the medium long enough to make a masterpiece?" Maybe then I'll hit another crisis and ditch writing, but for now, my skin and my soul are in this game.

Which brings me to the last note, a practical reminder for myself and for all those who struggle with finding or sustaining work that feeds the whole of us.
"To begin with, we take only those steps which we can do in a heartfelt fashion, and then slowly increase our stride as we become familiar with the direct connection between our passion and courage." - David Whyte
May we stay close to both our courage and passion indeed.


By the way, it's my birthday today, which is why the Enzyme has been late. I wanted to send it out on the right occasion. Please send me updates about how you are doing, it will make me very happy 🤗 (birthday privilege shouldn't be reserved only for birthday!) Schedule a chat here with me if you ever want a good conversation to dig deeper into life :-)

Sharing is sprouting.
If you have been forwarded this newsletter, feel free to subscribe to it here

The tree of my life

I've officially turned quarter century today 🎂 , and I thought of celebrating by telling a different version of my story using a metaphor.

The tree of Khuyen
Click to see the presentation I made recently for a cool group of people, Sandbox
I hope by telling a very detailed story of one person it could yield good insight in how one makes sense of one's life, past, present and future. Who knows, it may even spark some encounters between you and the magic of life!