Reading Thomas Moore’s A Life at Work

Middle age looms astonishingly near for a writer who built a brand on the nickname ‘The Girl.” Though I do not fear the wisdom that they say will make an appearance, few would describe me as mature or settled! I often joke that my youngest brother, now 23, is ‘finally my age.’ And once again, my teacher Thomas Moore can read my every molecule with a clarity I seldom possess.

“Some people get caught up in the Icarus syndrome at one point in their lives; others are perpetually like him- full of desire, somewhat reckless, and lost in their ideals. Often, too, they crash into a depression or some failed project and become disillusioned. Then they oscillate between grand ideas and failed experiments,” Moore writes in his new book, A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do.

On and on he goes, until I feel stark naked, but I’m not alone: I’m reading aloud to a friend I’ve always trusted as the more focused and pulled-together of our pairing. I’m reading to show myself- but he is seeing his own work, his crashing dreams, his amazing heights, his perceived failures.

Moore points out the glory of thinkers like Icarus: “…the spirit of Eternal Youth may give rise to idealism, inventiveness, enthusiasm, and a strong urge to be creative.” But the pitfalls are there to smash us mid-flight: “On the negative side, it is often unrealistic and wishful. At its core there often sits a smoldering narcissism- excessive self-regard, extreme self-consciousness….(he) thinks up one project after another and rarely completes any of them.”

I guess Moore has peeked right into my obsessive ‘list journals’ that I write on streetcars, in the bathtub, in the middle of church. “A writer of this type may have a box full of half-begun projects or a list of great ideas that will never be brought to fruition.”

Aha! See, there I go thinking it’s all about me…but perhaps the writer whom Moore refers to is Moore! In every book he gives us, Moore talks from his own experiences and his heart, both light and shadow. For years, I’ve taken comfort in knowing that my teacher was also taught by the great chaos and beauty of life. By now, Moore’s early dedication to life as a Catholic monk is legendary. He moved on to study music, to teach, to work in psychotherapy, and was still looking for his life’s work this whole journey. He became a family man later in life as well. Writing was something he did as expression of many of these things, and when he put his ideas about the soul into Care of the Soul, it was a smashing bestseller. Letters and reviews from people like myself poured in, marveling at Moore’s gift to reveal their life so eloquently.

It’s a great relief to myself, and to millions, to know that a man as talented and perceptive and ‘called’ as Moore watched life unfold in the same way we all do. Everyone expects a special stamp at 18 or 20: here’s your career, here’s your family, here’s your kids, here’s your future. But life unfolds in brilliant disorder: paths veer unexpectedly into another.

While this Icarus spirit seems like an uncommitted madman, my narcissism glows after the above bruising when Moore points out, “Out of all the visionary hopes and dreams may come brilliant ideas. The lives of inventors and artists are full of the struggle to get their novel ideas grounded in real life. A youthful spirit keeps you young and flexible. It may also be the basis of a fervent spirituality…”

I have a few other teachers, and one is an old friend I used to go raving with. It’s hard now to imagine us dressing up in brightly coloured plastic baubles and hitting the trance floor amid flashing lights and candy-coloured hallucinations. This phase passed, of course, as it does for most, and my younger friend went on to a life of religious dedication and became my own personal spiritual advisor. From the underground dance halls to the monastery seems a stretch, but isn’t. Both worlds sought to transcend life in search of spirit, to wade through illusions and come out with a different heart. This friend left the underground quickly, risking everything he knew as stable to become ordained as a Buddhist monk. He studied political science and graduated very young, then went on to Tibet, Laos, India, Thailand, Taiwan and New Zealand to work and pray in various monasteries. Additionally, he had to learn something of each language in order to pray and teach where he was. This kind of devotion and dedication is way too hard for most of us. I do not possess it.

The monk’s work or vocation, his calling, was clear from the beginning, and decidedly respectable. But oddly enough, his teachings always demanded that I embrace the very chaos I kept hoping to escape. The spiritual books he recommended, by beautiful authors like Pema Chodron, insisted that the midst of chaos was the midst of reality, and in my whirlwind life of big ideas and crashing dreams, of friends dropping dead like flies, of small triumphs and major travesties, I was an honorary Buddhist! Life is unfolding, he would tell me. Accept it.

Another teacher has been with me from the beginning. My father is a man who is unwavering in his literalist dedication to Christianity. He has lived in the same house, married to my mother, and worked at one job from which he retired 40 plus years later. He is the epitome of stability. Yet he also counsels me that life is unfolding. Once, when I expressed my distress that I was not yet a famous writer, he chuckled and said, “Your life’s not over yet.”

This brings me back round to A Life at Work- where Moore gently prods us to our calling, and shows us that our calling may not be a giant, world-dominating blaze of glory, and it may not be one specific thing. He asks us to watch carefully and let it unfold instead of suppressing it, to gently coax it from the ordinary moments, to wait for it through the tragic. He reminds us never to belittle our calling- we might be very good at a perfectly respectable thing like cleaning hospitals or selling shoes. Every contribution is important.

Moore always finds a way to bring in some of his favourite topics like alchemy, and he illustrates how we mix and temper our past experiences, good and bad, with our hopes for future possibilities. He shows us how to come to terms with our work past- from the mundane to the once glorious and failed. He shows us how to remain open to the opus we may not yet see patterning in our lives. He doesn’t say a word about how to make a resume or impress a corporation we’re hoping to move into. Instead, he gently gardens through our soul and reminds us that whatever we have planted or grown or lost, our life is not over yet.

A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do
Broadway Books (Random House), New York, 2008.

Visit the author of Care of the Soul, Soul Mates, The Soul of Sex, The Soul’s Religion, and The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life at www.careofthesoul.net.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Here’s what Thomas Moore said about Lorette’s poetry collection: “Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.”

You, too, will enjoy The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, so please visit my site to order, or order online through indigo or amazon.