Devoting time and energy to a talent or an idea is an indicator that self love is present.
Developing your talents is crucial to discovering, experiencing and revealing who you really are.
If you are not doing this, then huge regions of your being go unexplored and your sense of self is not what it could be.
You may have created a safe, small world for yourself, where you are in control and things are comfortable.
Or you may have done the opposite. You may have created a world filled with stress, frustration, a job you hate or a relationship that keeps you on edge.
Either way you’ve blocked out your talents. A huge part of you is simply not present.
Because it doesn’t fit in the world you’ve created.
You’ve constructed or become trapped in a world where essential elements of your being are simply not welcome.
But you’re not really trapped. There’s a way out.
Or in, if you like.
It just feels a little dangerous.
The venture zone
Maintaining control is not the same as being yourself. Being yourself requires repeated visits to a venture zone where you feel out of control, vulnerable, weak.
Even afraid.
Once inside the venture zone, you must reside there until you begin to feel strong.
Or you can bail out.
There are lots of ways to bail out. And no one can blame you if you do, because trips to the venture zone are tough stuff.
…the efficacious desire for your own well being.
But if you stay, you get bigger. You open access to new capacities, ideas, situations, relationships. You discover bits of yourself and activate them.
You expand.
Life takes you to the venture zone if you let. And often against your will. But developing your talents is a way to return to the venture zone on purpose.
You will never have the resources, endurance or inclination to manage the venture zone if you don’t love yourself.
Why bother?
We develop talents for several reasons. We’re driven by vision. We get crazy when we stray too long from our creativity. We derive comfort, solace from the exercise. It’s just plain fun.
All of these are indicators of a need. Developing a talent is you meeting that need.
It’s you demonstrating the efficacious desire for your own well being.
You have to carve out time for your talents. They compete with some really important things.
Family.
Work.
Sleep.
So, to actually bother, even for fifteen minutes a day, takes determination, commitment, desire.
But above all, self love.
Without self love, you won’t bother. You will have a desire for your own well being. It will take the shape of “I’d love to,” “Wouldn’t it be awesome if,” “I wish I could.”
But it will not be efficacious.
Without self love you won’t do anything about it.
In fact you’ll probably do the opposite. You’ll end up echoing all the lies you were told that drove your self love into hiding to begin with:
You’re not worth it.
It’s a waste of time.
You’ll never make money at it.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
Blah.
What talents really are
Developing your talents is one of the key ways in which you become the love of God in the world. It’s you making that love visible in a way only you can manage.
Consider that.
…an act of love for the world.
The vast, vibrant radiance at the heart of all things, that which gives birth to blazing suns, to worlds beyond reach, to the far off void and to the teeming planet on which we carry out our existence.
You tap into that, channel it, reveal it to others and in the process become so saturated it by as to manifest it with you every thought, word and deed.
But only if you love yourself, first.
Your fingerprint on creation
The combination of details that is you is unique for all time. The love of God can only appear as you because you exist.
So letting that out is an act of love for the world.
When you exercise your talents the world becomes something it was not previously. Each time you sit down to write, draw, play guitar, crochet a sweater or bake a soufflé, you make another small mark on the sum total of creation.
Your mark.
…it determines the fate of humanity.
A mark only you can make.
A mark which even you can only make at that particular moment under those particular conditions.
See how that works?
It’s pretty cool.
Each moment, every moment, is a unique opportunity. How you interact with it determines the fate of humanity.
A little bit.
Do people crochet sweaters?
Respect your own creativity
But it’s filled with risk. With possible rejection. With likely failure. With exposure to your own weakness, anger, immaturity.
And evaluation by others.
That’s why self love is so important.
If you’re going to weather all that harshness involved in developing your talents, if you’re going to fully enjoy the reward, you need a basic sense of respect for your own creativity.
…a manifestation of the Great Making…
A sense of respect will enable you to feel the opposite of respect, and respond to it.
You’ll know when you’re being self critical in the wrong way. You’ll recognize nay saying, or veiled derision.
And you’ll know when people are responding to your uniqueness out of their own lack of self love.
Which is huge.
Because that’s where nay saying comes from
The one who does not believe in your efforts has no faith in his own.
The one who derides your dream has let his own dream die.
The one who insists your goal is impossible has no sense of possibility.
The one who nay says your plans has a history of listening to nay sayers.
He lacks self love.
And he could be you.
If you lack self love.
With self love you will rise above the noise, ignore it, feed on it to its own chagrin.
To begin, recognize that your creativity, however it shows up, is a manifestation of the Great Making, the act of creativity that got this whole thing started.
About Peter Crowell
