People have often been surprised by my work ethic. This may be because of the generation from which I come. In my generation we did not look for an escape from work, or for the easiest way to do that work. We simply rolled up our sleeves and did the work. We knew that to complain was to express our own lack of character, so we didn’t do that. We knew the work had to be done, so we did it, no matter how hard it was, no matter how gross and disgusting it might have been. At least, most of us were that way. There were some who were not, but those folks were few and far between.
Somewhere along the way the art of delegation overtook the workforce. It became more popular to assign an unwanted task to someone else when you were perfectly capable of doing it yourself. The kicker is also the fact that the person who actually did the work is most often not acknowledged for that work. Instead the person who was originally assigned the task is given credit for its completion. Those are the ones who often now rise to the top of a company, lazy as they are, and the worker bees who put blood, sweat and tears into it are left with very little wage or acknowledgement.
So, when I would do something extra for my job, from the first job I had onward, employers were often surprised and amazed because they were not used to young people having incentive for excellence. Often they had been hiring those who would slack off, but who got the job because their uncle was the foreman, or their daddy owned the business and so on.
Of course, the problem with being a perfectionist with incentive who actually does get recognized from time to time is that the employer then wants you to progress and become a more integral part of the company. I did not want to ever be a manager, because then I would have to direct and manage people who lacked motivation. I never wanted to become a CEO of any corporation because I could not stand the all-too-frequent greed that I would witness from those on that level. So I would do my work and then move on. This means that I have done a lot of different things. Sometimes someone would refer to me as a “Jack of all trades, but master of none.” They had no idea what they were talking about. Yes, I could do a lot of different things, but I knew that my life was never going to be dedicated to any of those things, not the way it is dedicated to my current practice as a Shaman. That, to me, trumps all of the other stuff that may or may not have elevated me to the level of the corporate elite. I feel that I have a higher calling than that.
But the fact that I was chosen for Shamanism, and the fact that I accepted the call to it, in no way means that it has been easy. Quite the opposite in fact. The challenges of this type of work are not for the faint of heart. The various levels of awareness and attunement of consciousness can be daunting at best, utterly terrifying at worst. And just when you think that you might, indeed, be losing your mind, you see things so much more clearly and so much more deeply, and you end up astounding those with no consciousness whatsoever. It is not that they could not ever hope to achieve that level of consciousness. Truly, anyone can. But it is the fact that most will either be too lazy to do so or, once they try it, will run for the hills screaming because they will get completely overwhelmed by what they discover.
So, if this is something that you aspire to accomplish in your life, get ready. There is no turning back once you open that door. It is a matter of what you do with the new awareness as opposed to turning that awareness off. And really, one never need expect that everything will come easy. It takes hard work and dedication to make anything happen in life.
My mother used to say that, when it comes to hard work, some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all. She was so right.