We who cut stones must always be envisioning cathedrals

Photo by Dominik Kuhn on Unsplash

Most of us are not presidents or CEOs of big companies. We are either freelancers or owners of small companies, small entrepreneurs, or we have a job in a narrow part in a company.  What we actually do is likely to be quite “ordinary” or “mundane”.

 

Here is where the story we tell ourselves makes the big difference. We can either tell ourselves that we do is insignificant, has not greater value than a replaceable commodity. Or we can tell ourselves that what we do is part of a much bigger whole, that the bigger whole makes a massive difference to many people and will be there for the ages. We get to make a massive difference in a tiny area. We get to make an impact in a part of the universe that will be eternal.

 

Nothing is closer to the truth that we are bringing to the work we do the importance it becomes. The work itself is not what matters. What we bring to the work is what matters, and what changes it from being trivial to what matters eternally. We infuse meaning into the work, rather than the other way round.

 

We don’t ask for the work to give us meaning. Rather we bring meaning to the work.

 

If that’s how we approach every moment and every piece of work we do, sooner or later even the most apparently “shallow” work turns out to have the potential of going “deep” in meaning.

 

It is through the daily and moment to moment practice of bringing our best to any work that comes our way, that we turn every piece of mundane work into a genius level masterpiece. And every masterpiece stone we cut will contribute to our masterpiece cathedral.

 

I am curious, how can we unsee that what we bring to our work is the meaning of the work, rather than the work is what gives us meaning?  Does the possibility of unseeing this exist once we start practicing this 100%?