Love and Tar

Do you love what you do? I talk a lot about passion in our work, so I feel compelled to say yes to this question. Mission-driven leaders must love their work, right? But I don’t always love what I do. Sometimes I just do it. Sometimes it’s simply about getting the work done so I can get on to other things I love, such as having dinner with my wife or watching North Carolina basketball.

You know what I mean, which makes it curious that we mission-driven folks place such a premium on finding work we love. We say to ourselves and to others “Follow your bliss” or “Pursue your passion.” The reality is, we have responsibilities that feel like chores. We have hard stuff to slog through day in and day out. Still, we do the work. We roll up our sleeves. We hunker down. And we trust that it’s all for the good.

Last fall our company held a retreat at an old textile mill converted into live/work lofts and artist studios. At one point our facilitator took us into the central gallery space to view an abstract collection titled “Metaphysical Landscapes.” Our assignment was to consider what the art says about the terrain of our work.

I stopped in front of one piece. The shiny black paint was rough and pitted like the hot tar of a newly built road. There was red here, too, on the surface and under the depressions of black paint. I thought of the red as passion. I couldn’t say where the red began or ended, or what came first, the love or the tar. Yet I could see energy; I could see something being made, something worth doing.

I think that’s enough. On this Valentine’s Day, when “love is in the air,” I figure we don’t have to frustrate ourselves with a pure notion of passion that’s up in the clouds. We don’t have to divide our work between what’s meaningful and what’s mundane, or what’s mission and what’s business. We can just do the work, and give thanks for all of it.

Perhaps, amid the tasks, we’ll catch a glimpse of the difference our work makes. Maybe we’ll see how the work makes us, and maybe we’ll find that love finds us.