What really gives you joy? Creative work that is fruitful is long term, exhausting and many leveled. There are easier ways to get a paycheck. So I find that people who have settled into creative work have stuck with it for one reason: It gives them joy. At the very least they experience a level of satisfaction that keeps them engaged over time.
The joy occurs during the process as well as in response to the finished work. For every finished novel a writer produces, a half-dozen others remain unfinished-or finished-in a file cabinet. Most of them won’t get published because there’s some flaw or because the subject matter won’t sell. But the writer works on them anyway, because to do so satisfies something at the soul level.
So consider what gives you joy, deep down.
– from “The Soul Tells a Story: Engaging Creativity with Spirituality in the Writing Life” by Vinita Hampton Wright Loyola Press
