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I’m reading a great book called True Work: Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do by Michael Toms and Justine Willis Toms. Within it is a cited reference to another book called I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was by Barabara Sher. She says:

You need financial safety and you need some modicum of health. But they’ve studied happiness, and found out that once you’re not in a state of terror about money, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. [Quantity of money] is not related to happiness at all.

And of course this makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. It’s been said over and over again, heard it all my life, but it’s too simplistic for me, too black and white. Then Sher is further quoted – and this is the real wake up call for me, this has given me new eyes to see my circumstances with, greatly diminishing the stressful need to change my current day job:

There are two kinds of jobs in this world. One is the toxic job – it poisons you, and eats up all your time. This is a bad job. Whether you are going after a dream or not you’ve got to get rid of it or change it. You can’t do that to yourself; life is too short. The other kind of job is known as ‘not bad, but just not enough.’ That’s a good job. When you have a job that is not enough, you don’t have to subtract the job, you just add your dream to it. So this job should never make you work more than eight hours a day, preferably less. Never more than five days a week, preferably less. It should have pleasant people who tell good jokes at the water cooler, and hopefully hospitalization insurance. That’s what you need; then you can call that job a subsidy to the arts.

Went to the Neon movie theater downtown today, was mildly interested in seeing a new film about self discovery called “I Am.” Well I got alot more than I bargained for. I don’t think there could have been a more appropriate time in my life to be introduced to the concepts that this film has to offer. I cannot honestly find the words or even the focus to summarize here. I’m overwhelmingly flooded with inspirational thoughts, I’m going to have to spend many weeks reading about everything this film brings and days exploring the thoughts and feelings that result. It’s not a “change my life” moment, it’s more of a “showed me what I’ve sensed inside but didn’t know was real” moment. I strongly suggest getting to a theater to see it immediately. Doesn’t seem the film is available for rent or purchase yet but here is the web site in case you want to keep track or start exploring: http://www.iamthedoc.com/

Not sure what is more fun, the painting itself or the cleanup where all the colors mix and flow together in the sink, really relaxing I gotta say. Adults don’t seem to get time to play anymore. Make some colors in the sink, see how you feel.