Today’s Exercise: Consider a major goal or desire you have — one that might take you a lifetime to accomplish…or might never be fully accomplished — to which today’s message applies.
The Talmudic Sage, Rabbi Tarfon, used to say, “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
While he was referring to doing one’s part in "Tikkun Olam" (repairing the world), the same could apply to any individual major dream, goal, or undertaking.
Of course, he was not saying that you are not “legally" free from it; only that if you truly believe in it, then quitting is not an option if you want to feel good about yourself or to have a sense of happiness and satisfaction from acting congruently with your values.
Indeed, the result is actually secondary.
To put his advice into a more modern context we might say…
Key Point: Do the work you are called to do whether or not it is completed within your lifetime.
It is crucial, however, that while you might put your heart, soul, time, sweat, and energy into doing this to see it through to its fruition, you also do so without “attachment to the results.”
In other words, you’re doing it because you believe in it and are committed to it, not because your sense of happiness depends upon seeing it completed.
Important: While your actions are totally within your control, the results are not.
As we learn from many of the world's ancient religious and philosophical traditions, we can only control what is in our power to control. And when we are attached to controlling what we cannot control, that is when misery sets in.
Those “ancients” made a lot of “modern sense," didn’t they?
