A friend of mine from high school came to visit me recently for a weekend. She is a wonderfully thoughtful person and an incredible artist, whose name you will all know someday from her work and I will get to say, “I knew her when.” Over the course of the weekend, we spoke about everything from jobs to family to writing to religion and all the stuff in between, catching up from when we’d last seen each other (actually only a month before), recounting the little moments of our lives rom when we’d graduated high school together till now.

One of the things she told me about was a line from a play that she’d seen that had struck and stayed with her and now has struck and stayed with me. I do not know the play’s name, and I am definitely misquoting the line – it’s my memory of what she said from her memory of the play. But this is the line that struck me:

“It’s not your job to love your job. It’s not your job to love your spouse. It’s not your job to love your children or your friends or your family. Your only job is to love your life.”

Initially, this felt like semantics to me. How could I love my life without loving my family or my friends or my job? What does it mean that my job is only to love the whole of my life and not the parts of my life? But on further consideration, I realized this idea of only having to love your life gives you the space to not love everything and to actively choose what to love.

I think we all would love to love our day-to-day jobs, but this idea says it is okay if you don’t. It’s not your job to love your job. It’s your job to do it, but that doesn’t mean you have to love it.

I struggled more with the concept of not having to love your family, but that’s probably because I do love my family, I’m lucky to be a member of a lovable and loving family, so of course I love them. But I know there are many people who aren’t as lucky, so being told that it’s not your job to always love them, or love them at all, could very easily release the burden and pressure of being forced to feel love for people who may not be lovable.

There is an allowance to not have everything be perfect and pristine.

This also means that when you do love something, like your job, or your family, or whatever it is that you love, it’s an active choice, not a given. You are free to give your love to whatever or whomever you so choose, no one but yourself telling you to do so.

There is freedom in this concept.

Your only job is to love your life. Love the life you are leading, love the life you are striving for.

If you only love parts of your life, then when those parts start breaking down or going through rough patches, what will happen to you? What if everything falls apart at once, because the world and life is messy and icky like that? What will you be left with, if all you love is parts and not the whole?

But consider the inverse – if you love the whole (and, because you love the whole, you are more likely to love many of the parts of your life that make it up), then when some of the parts break down, the whole will still be there to sustain you. Sure, you hate your job today, but you love the life you’re living. Sure, you had a fight with your friend, but you love the life you’re building for yourself.

While I think this is a concept to consider periodically in your life, checking in to take to stock of where you are and truly asking if you love it, I feel like this is a concept that can also be applied to writing.

Your only job with writing is to love the story you are telling. You don’t have to love the process. You don’t have the love the characters. You don’t have to the love the sentence structures. You don’t have to love the words you use.

Should you love all of these things? Yes, it makes it so much easier to write and a more enjoyable time if you do. But what if you don’t? Or what if you don’t love them all the time? It’s all right. That’s not your job. Your job is to just love the story you are telling, the overarching whole that you are striving for.

No amount of great characters and perfect sentences and lovely word choices and minutes spent typing will make up for a story you are tired of and can’t stand to tell. Because there are days when everything breaks down. You can’t get the words to come, the sentences are horrible, the characters are messy, and it looks like there is no end in sight. But if I love the story I am telling, I can push through those bad days, weeks even, holding on for the story that, because I love it.

It’s a gift to love all the parts of your life and all the parts of your story. But that’s not your job, it’s not what you have to do. Your job, the only thing you must do, is to love your life and the story you are telling.