Introductions and Interests

 One of the things that one is often asked at interviews is something like, 'tell me what you do when you are not working', or 'tell me about yourself.' Today, I had a chance to meet the new director of our operations team, and he got our department into a room to ask us this same thing: tell me about your interests outside of work. This is all very interesting in the sense that we are always imagining that we are able to take ourselves and boil it down to a few activities that we like to do on our free time. It then becomes a question of who is more interesting, and who has the most filled schedule of interests. Of course, some interests are definitely more glamorous than others, but in all of this, there is this assumption that one can reduce their identity to a set of actions or repertoires, or what one does.
   An alternate way of looking at this kind of experience is to say that all interests and pursuits are roads or potential pathways to a self-transcendence. Woodworking is one such example: one starts out working with wood and then, through a deepened passion for it, one can sometimes experience a unified body and mind throughout the process of creating something. Soon enough, the experience itself provides a person with insights into the nature of what is: always changing, always dependent on numerous complex interactions, and always a mental experience. If one doesn't agree, one can always imagine what it feels like to do woodworking after one has had a bad argument, or a bad cold. In both cases, the act of being mentally influenced by illness or adversity can have an effect on one's relationship to their craft or interests.
   The point is that, all interests tend to create the same tendencies. They can deepen one's character just by leading a person to a place that is beyond the interest itself, or one's feelings about that interest. Can we then say that all roads lead to the same place? Well, I won't say that, because there is a variety of depth and level to a person's interests and there is never a guarantee as to what spiritual insights might be at the end of one's engagement in a hobby or pursuit. Certainly, a lot of it depends on intentionality. Nonetheless, the pattern of how one relates one's interests to something that is beyond interest itself is quite amazing to me, and it suggests that there is no end to what one can use to have spiritual realizations in daily life.