5th january, saturday, 2019
dear diary,
Maybe I am not passionate about anything because I have something to compare passion to. Maybe, if I had never experienced that writing phase, I would have fallen in love with music.
I felt that writing was my ikigai. Despite that, as I write today, I find myself stumbling over words. There's no flow. I know the quality of my prose has degraded, and it's something that bothers me deeply.
Here's what I've learnt about how to recognize your ikigai:
➤ your inner voice says that what you're doing is really something. You know it's good and you don't need anyone else to say it.
➤ I was as passionate about and proud of my work as a mother is of her children. I was creating a work of art. Every little detail meant something, it was beautiful, something that I had put a lot of effort into. These little things added up to make my masterpiece. Everything came together beautifully. How could people not like it? Somehow I knew it will be a huge success. I felt like I was giving something to the world, and that was my intention too.
➤ I thought about the story all day, turning the plot over in my mind. New ideas kept coming, and I kept stringing them together. I woke up, usually at 4 am, excited to write more.
Ever since I was a kid, I have heard stories of successful people who sacrifice their sleep for work, and it never made sense. Who would do that? How can someone work so much? How do these people know what to do to become so big?
But yes, it's possible to sacrifice sleep when the work is more enjoyable than sleeping. It doesn't even feel like work. Nothing else matters: food, parties, these seem like a waste of time. All this time could instead be spent on doing what one loves.
And somehow, one just knows what to do. There is an inner voice guiding us, we are simply following it. There is our gut feeling telling us what will work and what won't.
➤ It gave me a sense of fulfillment.
➤ I could relate to the term ikigai just because of it.
❄
YOU ARE READING
Old Yellow Pages ✓
Teen FictionA girl with a diary of pages yellowed with age, in search of herself, sitting in the oddest of places: sometimes on a staircase, sometimes at the top of a slide, sometimes on the branch of a tree; writing about life, the way she sees it. 🏆 Winner b...
