Spiritual Life

Look people, I talked a few posts ago about how writers and artists have personal lives that we need to be respectful of, but now I'm going to tell you that we writers and artists need to be respectful of our own personal lives.

Seems like commonsense to respect our own personal lives, but many of us don't.  Now, when I title this post, "Spiritual Life," I don't mean to suggest that we need to believe in anything other than ourselves.  If you know anything about me you know that I do hope and pray that you'll believe in God, but that's another story.  What I mean by "Spiritual Life" is that we need to live intentionally.  Without doing so we cut into our potential for success, joy and contentment.  Seriously.

Now what do I mean by living intentionally?  Simple.  Instead of running through life from one moment to the next, from one job to the next, from one exciting idea to the next, without ever sitting down and understanding who we are and what our general system for life should be, we should always center ourselves in a knowledge of who we want to be and what we want out of life.  By that I don't mean that we can simply say, "I want money and a family," and think that's good enough for centering ourselves.  Look people, if you want to be successful or happy--how I loathe that word!--you sure as hell better start dreaming about what you want and who you want to be and then constantly integrating those dreams into your current reality.  With each passing day, with each passing life choice, you need to meditate on who you are and where you're going; why you're doing certain things, why you're dating certain people, why you're working in the career that you are, etc. etc.  I don't mean, either, occasionally sighing to yourself, "Why in the world am I doing this..."  Hating your life for a second or two doesn't count as living intentionally, though it may very well be a good spark.

I'm totally serious here, people.  If you don't have this type of spiritual life you'll feel weighed down way more than you need to.  If you are religious, a heavy dose of prayer, scripture-reading, worshiping, etc. are also a must.  The lack of a spiritual life weighs you down, drains your motivation, infects your work, and convinces you, generally, that life isn't worth living.  As a writer or artist, once you get to the "life isn't worth living" stage, you then start questioning what the point of being a writer or artist is.  And questioning your life's work can be the end of you.  Trust me, I'm also there myself.