How are you feeling right now?

A blogging writing prompt

At work the other day I went to the vending machine and selected a bag of chips. When it dropped it floated down quite gracefully, as if it were in a low gravity scene in a science fiction film. It was quite beautiful actually. And when I picked it up it became obvious that there was not a single chip in the bag.

I first thought about getting a refund, but soon realized that this bag was far more valuable as a writing prompt. I began to think of my own ’empty bag of chips’, which was my life before I began to live authentically. I spent the first 60 years of my life being who others wished me to be, being who I was told. For the most part, from the outside, just like that empty bag of chips in the vending machine, things looked quite authentic. But empty bags of chips can’t suffer, they can’t hurt on the inside.

I wonder now as I walk about, on commuter rails, on busses, in grocery stores, how many empty bags, however attractive they might be, are walking about trying to ‘fake it until they make it’?

In 1974, Hoyt Axton and Renee Armand released the song Boney Fingers. The refrain says “Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Boney fingers.” This is how I see trying to find joy through misery.

Some religions seem to promote the idea of suffering through this world and this life to find joy in the next – we see this among ascetics. I can’t subscribe to such a theology. What I can subscribe to is a theology of loving-kindness, a theology that spreads love and kindness and joy where I’m permitted. Each of these is fertile. They grow and spread. They take root quickly in anyone that is ready to receive them. And what’s best is that they never diminish the giver. Unlike a bag of chips, the more of joy, of kindness, of love, that you give, the more you gain.

I could have looked at that empty bag of chips as something I had lost, I could have felt I had been cheated the money that was exchanged for an empty bag. One of my co-workers wanted to prank a fellow co-worker with it. But I immediately saw in that bag an opportunity. It wasn’t merely am empty thing, it was a lesson, a parable, an insight, and far more valuable and worthwhile, empty, than any full bag of chips.

I think that the most important lesson I learned so far in my journey is that I can’t work hard enough to find happiness in the end. Happiness and joy aren’t products of misery. The harder and longer I work, the less time I’ll have for that happiness. Instead, I need to find work that brings me joy. I might be able to work for a short time for the hope of future joy, but none of us are guaranteed a future. We can’t pretend that we will certainly be healthy in our retirement to enjoy a retirement.

An unfulfilling  career is a recipe for an unfulfilling life. It took me far too long to discover this, but not so long that I was unable to learn that it’s never too late to change directions.

So I suppose the question I have for you is this: do you feel your life is full and rich? Or is it more an empty bag of chips? And if it’s the latter, is this what you want right now? If it’s not, what steps can you take to make that life more fulfilling? And perhaps most importantly, are you willing to take those steps?