Doing only what you love

Well, I don't only do what I love.  For instance, I don't love driving to work during the rush hour - though I love driving home again!  I don't love having to interact with people a lot, such as at work - but I enjoy being with other autistic people at the day centre.  All the same, if I didn't have to do it - if I didn't have to work - I wouldn't.  I'd stay at home, as I am today, doing what I do love: sitting in the warm, looking out at the snow falling, knowing I don't have to go out there.... and writing.  Writing has been my sanctuary and my obsession since I first discovered stories at around age 10.  I love looking at that blank page, then the thrill of reaching for the keys when something sparks off in my head: a line, an image, a situation.  I love the process - hard though it is - of putting it down, connecting the bits together, creating something new.

I also love messing with Gimp - the free image editing software, similar to PhotoShop.  I love creating memes, or pictures - especially collages.  I have no artistic abilities, really - I can't draw or paint - but Gimp gives me the tools I need to make the picture I'm imagining.

So - for today, at least - I'm doing what I love.  If I could make money from it and do it full-time, then I'd truly only be doing what I love.

Meantime... bills have to be paid, so the job has to be held onto.  I know it could always be worse, though...

I think there is always room for improvement, in our lives and in the world around us. My idea of making my life better would involve trying to be make more of a positive impact on the world and on the people around me. I don't have any great influence or abilities, so it is only small things. It might include buying a copy of the Big Issue from a vendor instead of walking past, offering a lift home to a neighbour laden down with shopping, or even just clearing a huge pile of stinky laundry and doing a good job. It's true that the impulse has to come from inside, but the effects are outward as well.

As for saying you don't know the difference between good and bad, and surely everything's good, I don't understand what you mean. People dying of starvation in one country while people die of obesity-related heart disease in another is bad. Genocide is bad. Ecological destruction is bad. It's not just a matter of how you feel about it.

As for finding happiness, I can see what you're getting at, the feeling of happiness originates inside us. I just meant that it is often triggered by things happening around us. I try to be content with my circumstances, but improve them if or when possible. and what counts as "improvement" is a personal decision. But it should ideally be a decision which does no harm.

My house is my retreat from the world as well and I don’t consider anyone a failure. 

Really?!? Maybe you’re not a sunshine and roses kind of person then because I love roses and I’m pretty confident that I would love them even if we didn’t have wars and murder etc in the world. And yeah, I can see your point about sunshine, I would much rather be out in the freezing cold of the Antarctic or something rather than in the glare of a red hot sun but the sun is the sun, I doubt we would be alive without it so I’m pretty happy we have it continuously. We live in a world of contrasts, we can’t have one without the other, so if we are ‘good’ we are also equally ‘bad’ because everything, apart from love, has its equal and opposite. Like two sides on the same coin. You can’t say there is more of the queens head side than the other, both sides are the same. What’s this seeming obsession with ‘difficult’ being aquainted with bad and unhappiness? 

I don’t know if it’s posdible to make your life ‘better’ is it. What does that even mean, I don’t understand. How can one thing be better than another? 

And what do you mean about finding happiness? Surely happiness is within you? How do you find it outside of you and where would you even begin to look for it? That sounds like a scary and exhausting prospect. Looking for something in the world when you don’t know where it is and we live in a big world, it could take a while. What does it even look like? And are you saying difficult things can’t  equate to happiness? So that’s a bit of a clue when searching for happiness. Now we know it’s not found in things that are difficult! It’s a start I suppose. 

I know what you mean about sometimes pushing yourself to do things you don’t want to do but doing them anyway because they expand your world. I do that but see it in a different way to you. I see it as pushing myself to do something new, which can be scary and can feel like it’s something I don’t want to do, but only because it’s something new and I don’t do well with change but if it’s giving me some benefit, then it is something I want to do. Although I rarely do that these days but I still do, such as now for instance, I’m going to have a bit of a wash before I go out. I don’t necessarily want to do that but I know I’ll feel better for it so I will. 

I don’t know how to take the good with the bad because I don’t know the difference. Surely everything’s good and if we think something is bad, it’s only bad because it doesn’t meet a preference within us, but it doesn’t mean it’s ‘bad’, only to us in that moment relating to our particular preferences at that time. You said sometimes, you have to work with what you have, what do you do the rest of the time? Work with what you haven’t got? I don’t understand, working with what we have is the only thing we can do, surely, and what we have within us is the greatest power on earth. How can we ever have anything better than that? 

Is it possible to fail at anything or fail at life? What would that even look like? I can’t even begin to imagine what failing or failing at life looks like. And of course Evan’s posts are more like the reality of most people because most people are conditioned to think and feel that way. Empires and societies and communities couldn’t be built so well or as efficiently if everybody was free to enjoy their own experience of the world. It would be much harder to convince somebody to spend, say, 8 hours of their day, doing something they didn’t want to do, making somebody else rich and happy, while receiving only a modest return for their contribution towards somebody else’s wealth and fortune. So of course people have to be mass conditioned, and most are a success but some slip through the net and think for themselves, they develop their own values, judgements, thoughts etc and get shunned by most of the rest of the herd for daring to not follow the rules, created for them by some rich egotistical wealthy person or persons. So yeah, that is most definitely the reality for most people. 

Who wouldn’t love sleeping on a park bench, close to nature, waking up to the fresh fragrance of the beautiful flowers. I hear also that sleeping on something like a plank is good for the back. When I was homeless and living on the streets, I feel no less happiness or no less wealthy than when I’ve bedn living in a house with more money than I can spend. In many ways, for me anyway, being homeless is so much easier. I don’t have to think about cooking and getting washed, dressed and changed again every day and night, I don’t have all the bills to deal with, all that dam housework that’s never ending. Being homeless has lots of benefits and you receive so much love, kindness and sheer generosity from other people. The sight of a homeless person seems to bring out the generosity and kindness in some. I see no difference in sleeping on a park bench or in a mansion apart from are you warm and comfy and fortunately maybe for me, I can sleep on a washing line and don’t feel the cold so much but it’s relatively easy to get warm blankets, even when you’re homeless. 

It sounds to me like your doing more of what you love than you realise. I don’t think the trick is to do only what you love or the things that facilitate what you love, but I think that’s much better than not doing anything that you love. I’ve found the trick to be to do only what you love and then you receive everything you need or want. That approach comes at a cost of course, like all things in life and most people aren’t prepared to pay the cost. 

Good point Flo .... I have often thought that if life were to be sunshine and roses all of the time, would we even appreciate it? Or do the difficult bits help us to see how wonderful the good bits can be?

I like the idea of doing only what I love, but in real life you just often have to find what happiness you can in between the difficult bits, and sometimes in spite of them, when you can. For example, have a fairly monotonous job, in the laundry at a care home, but it pays the bills. And there is some satisfaction to be had, because I like to see everything left clean and neat, even if I know the baskets will be piled high with smelly laundry again the following day.

I have a family who sometimes drive me crazy, but who I love unconditionally. Sometimes I have to push myself to do things I don't like, but they have expanded my world.

You have to take the good with the bad, because that is how it is for everyone. By all means try to make your life better if you can, but sometimes you just have to work with what you have.

Assuming that most people on here have not won the lottery / inherited a fortune / figured out how to get the state to support them,  I imagine that "only doing what you love" only works if you love sleeping on park benches! Evan's posts are probably closer to the reality for most people. I don't think that makes you a failure, it's just ...... life. And you know what, it's just life for a lot of NTs as well, I suspect.

If you take my own personal dichotomy: what I love is spending time in my house (my retreat from the world) with my cats, in front of the fire, and the only way that I can make this happen is by doing my job. My house, small and scruffy as it is, costs a king's ransom in mortgage payments because it is in the SE. And before anyone says "move somewhere cheaper", this is where I am from, where my family is, and within reach of the only available jobs in my line of work, so that is not an option. If I didn't pay the mortgage, I'd have to rent, and no-one around here accepts pets, so my beloved boys would be lost, and that would make me miserable beyond compare. 

I don't love my job. Sometimes it's interesting and I even enjoy it, sometimes it's annoying, and sometimes it (or the dreadful commute) actually makes me ill. But it does pay for the occasions when I get to do what I love, so I won't be throwing in the towel any time soon!

Maybe the trick is to only do what you love, or things that facilitate doing what you love??

That is so heartwarming and inspiring Blade. I too have simple tastes. I love how you have set your work life up and how you have all bases covered. You’re a true joy and a gift to this world and you’re  following in the foot steps of one of our great inventors, Steve Jobs. He used to look in the mirror every day and ask himself, if today was my last day on earth, would I be doing what I’m about  to do today. And if he got a no, three times running, he simply changed what he was doing. Thank you for being you and for being a true blessing to this world. Your loving contribution touches not only your blessed family, but it reaches every corner of the universe, touching everyone in it with your calm and loving ways. None of us lives in isolation, we all touch each other, near and far. Radio waves can only travel in a straight line and from one specific point to another but the life force within us moves in every direction, reaching every point and I am truly grateful for the love and good feelings you send out to me and each and everyone of us. The world needs more Blades.

You will never be in a position to do only what you love California, our society doesn’t work like that. From being baby’s we are groomed and taught to do what our parents want us to do and then our school system is set up for us to do what the teachers want us to do and then if you go into employment, we do what our employers want us to do and even outside of that, many people go along with the societal norm of how we spend our leisure time. But if you make the decision to do only what you love to do, before you know it, you will realise one day, hey, I’m doing what I love. The decision comes first and the rest flows naturally from that. Never hope, it is a disempowering position to put yourself in as you are effectively giving your power away. Take your power back and decide that from this day forward, you choose to do only what you love. You don’t even have to know what you love doing at this stage, you need only make the decision to do what you love and the rest, as they say, is history. I guarantee you that if you chose to make the decision to do only what you love to do, and you don’t go back on that decision,  you will find yourself one day, doing only what you love. You don’t have to know ‘how’ to do it, only that you will and the intelligent life force within you will figure out the way, the most perfect way, in the way it does when it breathes your body and pumps the blood around your veins. You don’t know how to do that but it does and it will also bring your dreams into reality. If you decide to do only what you love, it will make it happen as surely as it breathes your body. 

That's great Nada. Seeing horses gives me great joy. A house I lived in, in the Lake District, used to get horses going past, I used to delight in the sounds their hooves made and then seeing the fine beast would increase my joy even more.

My upbringing was similar to yours, my family all thought I was weird for not drinking alcohol and joining in with all their 'fun'. I also love cycling, although when in England it is pedal cycling that I do but I love it and yes, I meet with some rather interesting sights on occasion. When I'm in Bali or India I ride a motorcycle. I'm just starting to get a bit interested in the camera although I don't think it's going to be my thing. I always feel I'm missing out on something when I take a photo, as if the camera is depriving me of the moment but I have found a little fondness for looking back over photos, occasionally, and I would like to use my own photos on my web site etc. 

Keep up the good work and please share any interesting photos that you take while you're out and about. 

I only do what I love. But, I do have very simple tastes.

I love being with my family, so I spend all of my free time with them.

I work a minimum wage job that I really enjoy, because I have no interest in a high-flying career that takes up my time and mental energy. So I know that I'm not tied down by needing a certain salary if I ever stopped enjoying my job, and I have free time without worrying about any commitments.

What makes me happy is just living the easy life, to maximise time with my loved ones, so that's exactly what I do. And if there's ever anything I'm not happy with in my life, I just change it.

I hope one day to be in a position to do only what I love.

Parents always expecting me to fit in with them and relatives. Which involved going on holidays with constant bickering family, partying on traditional occasions, getting drunk, being bombarded with non-productive political rants, then waking up with bad hangovers the morning after. I shunned everything for solo motorcycling and cameras.