How to Find the Work You Love by Laurence G. Boldt

Author:Laurence G. Boldt [Boldt, Laurence G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-14T21:38:08+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Integrity: The Call of Conscience

If I am not I, who will be?

—Henry David Thoreau

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE of integrity is: Be true to yourself. As Shakespeare said, “This above all,—to thine own self be true; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” This is not only good moral advice, but a practical necessity of the creative life. For when you are separated from your “own self ” (the voice of your conscience), you are left without the power of creative action.

Virtue is a word that means both “effective force or power” and “moral excellence.” It is moral excellence, obedience to your own conscience, that gives you the effective force or power of creative action. Your conscience may from time to time tell you things you don’t like hearing about yourself; but if you make a habit of ignoring it or turn it off altogether, you abandon the guiding force of your life and lose the power of creative action. Compromise your conscience and the power deserts you. Adhere to it once again and the power returns.

Your conscience, that still, small voice deep within, is but an echo of the eternal and all-pervading intelligence of the universe. Listening to it gives you the sense that all is right with the world, that you are going with the flow of the universe, at one with its creative powers. Emerson said, “One who has access to this universal mind is party to all that is or can be done.” From the standpoint of the individual ego, this universal creative mind has a mind of its own. It cannot be controlled or reasoned with; it must be followed. As Charlotte Brontë wrote, “He who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that at times strangely wills and works for itself.” What separates creative individuals from the rest is not so much their special talents or abilities but their capacity to hear and respond to this creative intelligence.

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