Around ten years ago, I had an idea. Actually, it might have come to me as far back as 1999 with the impending birth of my first child. I started to deeply question my life’s purpose and the reason for my being here on this world. It wasn’t the first time I wondered about this. I was the product of a liberal arts education that openly encouraged this sort of thinking. But now there was a new sense of pressure to figure it out. I was to become a father and it’s a parent’s job to help his children eventually start to figure out the madness of modern life. Okay, so maybe I had a few years before I had to deal with my daughter’s questions about the meaning of life and the universe. But what would I say when that day came? Would I have any answers?
Anyone who has started an existential quest knows that once you begin to look under one stone, you have to look under all the others too. And so it is in my own journey. Since my career decisions would be critical to the welfare of my newly expanding family, I started to more closely examine what it means to have a job and work. My own personal experience of work wasn’t terribly inspiring. Rather it was depressing and somewhat terrifying. Growing up in West Virginia, I watched my own father toil at a job in which he was never truly happy or satisfied. But he kept doing it because he felt the obligation to his family. Was this what I had to look forward to? A lifetime of professional futility and drudgery? I had to know there was something more, a chance I could find work that not only allowed me to support my family but gave me a sense of deep fulfillment.
In the intervening years, I’ve been on a quest to find my own answers to what makes soulful work. I haven’t always been faithful to the quest. There have been periods when I’ve wantonly ignored it…but I’ve always had the quest beckon to me, asking me to return.
The Alchemy of Soulful Work is about that quest. It’s also a prelude to the book I’m writing of the same name. Think of this site as an online playground for us to explore the idea of soulful work together. My sincerest hope is that we can redefine what it means to work and inspire a new way of thinking about our careers and life. So come on and lets get started…we have much soulful work to do.
