Thought for the Day…

Good ol’ Joseph Campbell. I just got this quote in my email ‘inbox’ courtesy of Real Simple’s Daily Thought. I am sort of a collector of quotes and love getting new ones everyday to get me thinking. This one just got my mind going–remembering my days in college when all I really had to do was read, think and take pictures!

Back in one of my college photography classes, each week my teacher would play one part of an amazing 6-part series of interviews Bill Moyers did with Joseph Campbell back in the 80’s. The series is called “The Power of Myth.” If you have not heard of him, Joseph Campbell was a well-know thinker, teacher, and historian. He is definitely worth learning more about. You can read more about his remarkable man on Wikipedia. Anyway–the brilliant idea my photo teacher had was to let us watch these fascinating interviews–in which Mr. Campbell talks at length about mythology, philosophy, ancient history, and religious thought. The role of storytelling in human history. It is amazing. Since this was an advanced photography class, the teacher did not want to dictate what each of her students would shoot each week. We had already learned the basics of shooting in previous classes and here she wanted each of us to be inspired and to interpret our learning photographically in our own way.  Talk about a dream class! It married my two favorite disciplines–Philosophy and Art.

From Wikipedia:

One of Campbell’s most identifiable, most quoted and arguably most misunderstood sayings was his admonition to “follow your bliss.” He derived this idea from the Upanishads:

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked. ^[33]

He saw this not merely as a mantra, but as a helpful guide to the individual along the hero journey that each of us walks through life:

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.^[34]

Well. I meant to just post a quick “Thought for the Day” but feel like I could go on and on about this! But, alas, I won’t. First, because I don’t have time. And second, because I am sure I would bore you all to death! But you don’t have to be a complete geek like me to find the truth and beauty in these quotes. I personally need to be reminded often to get back to what matters, to what feeds me. It is easy to get consumed by or buried under all of the everyday distractions we have. And while those things matter–it’s how we pay the bills or how we get food on the table–underneath all of that is what truly matters. We all have jobs to do, errands to run, people to see. Life can get crazy sometimes. What we need to remember to do is step back and make sure that the things we are doing actually feed us.

Uh oh–I am starting to ramble.

Be gone, now! And follow your bliss.