Our lives float on little moments of joy.  Sipping a cappuccino at a coffee house on a lazy afternoon.  Dancing with a wonderful partner.  Sitting outdoors with the sun shining on your face.   Spending five minutes with the daily crossword puzzle that you never finish.  Throw one or two of these little moments into a day and getting out of bed in the morning suddenly seems worth it.

We might not want to admit it, but we all live for those little moments.  Without them, our days are simply filled with the motions of modern life that we must go through to make a living.  Get up.  Shower.  Go to work.  Work.  Work.  Work.  Lunch.  Work.  Work.  Work.  Grab dinner.  Workout.  Balance your budget until the next payday.  Deal with the latest crisis that your co-workers have identified.  Pickup your dry cleaning that has been sitting at the cleaners for nearly a month; if you don’t pick it up today, they’ll throw it out tomorrow.  And remember to turn in the overdue video rentals on the way to the cleaner.  Plus pickup some milk because the jug in the fridge has spoiled.

Oh.

And try to squeeze in a personal life somewhere in there.

Yeah.  We all need those little moments.

For some, the day-to-day motions of their lives and their passions align, creating rich and exciting lives full of those little moments.  A woman who loves to cook becomes a chef.  A man who loves to draw becomes an illustrator.  A child who dreams of the stars becomes an astronaut.  For these people, each day they wake up to a world where what they do is what they are totally passionate about.  Their days are bursting at the seams with these little moments of joy.

For others, bad luck, poor choices, or undiscovered wants block the way to a life full of these joys.  So the days go by, these little moments sustaining the soul.

A friend once told me about a doctor he knew, an amazingly accomplished surgeon.  For as long as he could remember, his parents pressed him to become a doctor.  In his heart, he didn’t want to, but he didn’t feel like he had any other options, so he buckled down and became a doctor, a surgeon, one of the best in the country.

And yet, for all of his skill as a surgeon, for all of the acclaim and lives he has helped, he finds no joy in his job, no fulfilling satisfaction in his work.  So my friend asked him how he manages to go through the day, how does he do it.  And the surgeon said,” I play the piano.”

Every morning after getting up, he would play at his piano for an hour.  Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, the greats.  He was so skilled that he could easily play with any professional orchestra in the world.  And yet, instead he goes to work and does his job, his soul sustained by his music.  In no small way he is at ease because he has found a way to align his life with his passion, letting himself float through the day on a little moment of joy found at a piano at daybreak.

Home | Making the Chef | Photo Galleries | On Dancing | On Cooking | Random Thoughts | About the LindyChef | Links

Questions? Email Martin@LindyChef.com