I don’t tap dance to work, but am glad I do not crawl. I enjoy doing what I do even though it’s not my passion, I haven’t found my passion and I even don’t know what passion means.
Tap dance originated in the 1700s at the crossroads of African and Irish American dance forms. When slave owners took away traditional African percussion instruments, slaves turned to percussive dancing to express themselves and retain their cultural identities but Warren Buffet uses it to express his happiness in what he does, articulating the fact that it hasn’t taken away his life when he stated that he tap dances to work contrast to what most of our jobs are doing to us.
Indeed a book was written about tap dancing to work but am not here to review the book neither am I here to talk about Warren’s massive wealth, google can do that for you. Am here because the phrase resonated with a page in the current chapter of my career; what am doing satisfies me, there are intangible results.
Steve Jobs said that the most important thing is to understand and realize that if you poke life, something will pop out the other side, that you can change and mold it. It puts you in a position to make your mark on life instead of just living. When I do respond to someone having a heart attack or seizure or even relieve someone of pain from a wound that they’ve been hiding for fear of visa reversal, and you see them improving, something popping out the other side after poking life, it brings joy to the soul that monetary incentives don’t.
We are in a period of our lives where everything seems to change, the tide is turning, and it seems theoretically impossible to poke life or even tap dance to work but this same tide was ridden by the likes of Marcel Breuer who put his artistic talents to use when he designed Minimalist furnishing that could be easily cleaned, used and not hold bacteria combating the spread of the virus during the heights of the Spanish flu in 1918. We can all find a way to ride this tide, we just have to look within and not without.
Joel Richard 