“You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of your work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working…Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender.” -Bhagavad Gita (found in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey) 1965 was the last year that J.D. Salinger published anything. He died in January at age 91. However, in the last 45 years he continued writing. Joyce Maynard, who had a year-long relationship with him in 1972, said that he wrote a few hours every morning. She also said that at that point he had two completed novels. More recently, friends and neighbors that visited the house tell of a bank vault in there with all of his writing. Jerry Burt, a neighbor said, “He told me there were about 15 or 16 books finished but that he didn’t know if they would be published.” In a 1974 interview with The New York Times, he explained, “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing … I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Margaret Salinger, his daughter, describes in her memoir his filing system for his unpublished manuscripts: “A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this ‘as is,’ blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.” This is a great example of passion at work. The quote from Franny And Zooey that started off this post sums up a key part of passion. The work is done for the sake of itself, not for the results, not for the external reward. As a writer and a musician, I know of this challenge – to put something out in the world and not know how and where it’s going to be received – who it touches and who it doesn’t. But that’s not my job, as much as I may dally there. My job, and your job if you’re living your passion, is to do a form of what Salinger did – do our work, our passion, for its own sake. He obviously had the financial luxury to not publish – but the main point is – he never stopped writing – he just wrote presumably because it was his passion, his craft, his life’s work. And even though he said he wrote for himself – he kept all those manuscripts This may be helpful the next time you’re not recognized by your boss, customer, teacher, spouse for the good work you did. It’s hard when this happens, and the power of purpose only happens when you’re aware you’re touching other people’s lives. But your primary reward in the land of passion is in the work itself, getting lost in it, absorbed fully with all of your senses. Robert Bly told me once that you need to give things away in order to remember this passion. He told of taking the only copy of a poem he had written and putting it in a pine tree deep in the woods where no one human would ever see it. And he said, “it has to be a good poem.” Now that’s a way to reconnect with passion! Whenever I find myself lost in how some project is going to turn out, I know I’ve left the land of passion. And work without passion is a painful place. Then I know it’s time for me to find the passion again in what I’m doing today. Where does your passion lie in what you do every day? How can you redirect yourself so the work itself becomes the reward?
