Member-only story
Coming Out of Hiding
FINDING GOOD WORK
Finding good work, no matter the path we have chosen, means to begin with and no matter our first logistical steps toward it, coming out of hiding. The path to good work is the path of making ourselves visible… it is good to have a dream, but the moment we put the dream to hazard, we enter the fiercely beautiful territory of risk and face the real possibility of failing.
How many times have we kept a hope or dream in abeyance because even thinking about the possibilities of failure were too much to contemplate? If we failed at that central, precious thing that we have always had in reserve for an alternative life, then who would we be? Would there be any one we like left at all? Far better then, not to risk at all, to choose something smaller, to undertake some logistical task we don’t mind getting wrong, something we could recover from, something where we are, in effect, still invisible, to ourselves and to the world. Better to choose a world where things don’t matter. Better not to appear fully on life’s radar screen.
But in taking the path of visibility we arrange for a different kind of disappearance — into the work, the task, the audience, the one who will receive what we have conceived, the life that opens up, where the fearful one who first dreamt is burned away both by a building anticipation and a living contact with a future we…
