Be Aware of Duty

"To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart."

-- Pearl S. Buck

Many of us have been taught to do our duty. What does this imply to you? For me, ‘doing my duty’ means doing something I really don’t want to do. My heart’s not in it, and so the energy for the act isn’t there. I have to force every move. Usually, there’s underlying resentment. When this is the scenario, tasks may get done but there’s no gift to the world.

We do not truly serve the world if we give to others but neglect our own truth and our own needs. We need to give to ourselves as we give to others. IT’S NOT SELFISH TO LOOK AFTER OURSELVES -- IT’S ESSENTIAL!

"Forget the resolutions. Forget control and discipline...too much work. Instead try experimenting. Go in search of something to fall in love with...something about yourself, your career, your spouse."

-- Dale Dauten

"Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things."

-- Albert Einstein

Taken from http://www.higherawareness.com

 

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This was my starting point from the Higher Awareness team this morning.  Duty... I seem to spend my who life managing my "duty".  Dealing with my duty and being seen by others as performing and acting as expected, turning up on time, completing tasks within the schedule given (if that schedule is truly impossible).  Picking up the pieces when others fall down on their duty - plugging the gaps and being viewed as a reliable, good all round egg.

Except I am not - a good all round egg.  I become overwrought and overstretched when my mind is full of too many complicated tasks, with no means or sense of completion being available.  There is no room to breathe and I feel and look like a frozen iPod.  This sense of perpetual failure is crucifying me.

To be controlled and disciplined is what was expected from my parents, and their parents, and the ones before them.  Therefore this is what I expected from myself and become increasingly frustrated when I don't live up to my own high demands. 

Duty seems also to be the by ward and excuse for other's failures.  When whoever, whatever, doesn't want to do something it gets dumped on me, becomes MY PROBLEM.  I like an idiot then pick up the baton and run with it.  Hoping that by resolving the problem, and making the problem go away, I will be appreciated for who I am... a practical problem-solving pain in the neck.

Then the other issue is people's grand ideas, conceptualisation.  I have a very good friend, a lovely person who comes up with all kinds of really inspiring ideas, starts the projects and then loses interest. By the time though that her interest has evaporated, other people have become involved, and as they are usually people who are quite fragile and trusting, we are talking with mucking with someone's self-worth if the projects fail.  As I can usually see the projects have legs, worth and merit, I tend to get stuck in to resolve the situation.  I hate waste and letting people down, so am then left holding the problem.....I am a doer and a thinker.

Now this isn't always a bad thing - two of the writing groups I run at the moment have come from this stable of opportunity, or I should say similar background and have given me particular pleasure, but the two groups that I struggled with and people still on my back were from her leavings, and I should have done exactly that - leave it. 

I would not be the person I am so proud of today if I had not had a sense of duty, moral ethics, code of conduct.  I have learned so much and am so much because of my sense of duty, determination, grit etc. 

But I am so tired though and fed up, my life source is being drained by people who feel their ability to conceive and create should be have priority of my desire to conceive and create.  By people who think that they don't own their own problems, and by not having enough time to be in my own mind. 

So I am going off to finish my Assignment (only a week overdue)
Sort out worksheets for another Writing Group tomorrow night
Finish some work that I didn't have time to last week so I can get a head start on Monday morning
feel guilty about not going to a Knitting Group that I wanted to this afternoon
and go to visit Toby.... all before I sit down and have breakfast...

no wonder I am stressed, if I do this on a day of rest, when do I get to rest... well there is always next week !!