What bridges are you building?

The things that bring you most joy will bring the most service to the world….

A poem by the wonderful Will Allen Domgoole to get this blog post underway. Her poems were a service to the world, and this one will be worth your time I promise. She wrote over 7000 by the way.

The Bridge Builder.

“An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide,
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.

"Old man," said a fellow pilgrim near,
"You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
Yon never again will pass this way;
You've crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?"

The builder lifted his old gray head;
"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,
"There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!"

Lovely right? So many potential interpretations, metaphors, life lessons, and hidden meanings (and some not so hidden).

One to consider is the miracle of “service”.

Service is a key, an important one.

It’s a key to joy, to freedom.

How long we thought service meant doing everything for everyone. How long we thought service had to be hard, taxing, boring. That it meant doing something we didn’t want to do to help someone who really didn’t want to be helped.

Now, we’re defining service differently. Service is joyful. It’s an attitude, a belief, a way of looking at ourselves and our lives.

Service arises and springs naturally out of our own unconditional positive self-regard. It arises from being who we are and from doing the things we want to do and are led to do.

Our Being is service.

Our very life is service.

Who’d have thought it?!

The things that bring you most joy will bring the most service to the world.

AND….

Despite what we may be telling ourselves, doing things we don’t want to do will leave us and the world around us cold, untouched, unmoved.

Service is being who you are.

So get deep into unconditional positive self-regard, and enjoying the journey it leads to. Service will flow naturally from that.

It will be freely given and freely received.

And by doing this, in so many ways you too, like the old man in Domgoole’s poem, will be building bridges for others….

—
Andrew.