Work calls forth character-we can use it or lose it!

David refers to Doctor Lydgate's character development over time in George Elliot's Middlemarch: 


Lydgate with an original approach to medicine and a strong youthful idealism, but Eliot lays out the danger awaiting him from the very beginning of Lydgate's career. ...The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross,  is hardly ever told in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other useful loves, till one day their earlier welf walked like a ghost in its old home ...(p.165-166)

When the place in which we work (even live, for some) makes less and less room for who we are, who we wish to become,  and the gifts we can readily share ... it is time to take oneself on a personal retreat.

1. Stop: Decide to make space and time to recover your well-being...an hour, a day, a week, five minutes is often enough to catch ourselves before we tumbling down that ole rabbit hole!
2. Drop: Go deep within to reconnect with what "sources" us ... fills our soul with enthusiasm, order, goodwill, stimulates our imagination
3. Roll: As we fill up again, we can notice that our imagination rekindles, our perspective clarifies leading to good judgment, wisdome redirects our initiatives and revises our intentions.
4. Set revisioned parameters that preserve and protect the good we are, the good we bring...
5. Firm boundaries between Self and places and spaces around us to enhance the possibilities that surrounding good can come through us!  
6. Without healthy skin, we do not live long on Planet Earth.  Strong and sustainable emotional/spiritual skin also begs daily cultivation -sometimes hourly... the regularity depends upon our the nature and quality of our home situation, our workplace conditions.
7. Like Smokey the Bear ... only we can prevent "forest fires" in our homelife, in our worklife.   Songwriters Arlen and Mercer help us with this catchy tune from the fifties: "You gotta accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don't mess with Mister In Between..."
8. Let the muse be your guide as you co-create a better order that sustains healthy relationships among those with whom we live and work.