Do you work?

Yes? For what? For money? For fun? So that you can stay away from your family for at least some part of the day? There can be a variety of reasons. But do these reasons justify your spending of at least 1/3 of your life doing something that you wouldn't do with the first opportunity you may get?

I think that only those who would continue doing what they do even if they don't get paid for it are really living well. I know it sounds impractical but then that's me! Would you go to your job tomorrow if they stop paying you? I know that money is very important. But what if you had enough to ensure that all your's and your family's material needs are taken care of? Would you go back to that job that doesn't pay? I don't think your answer is positive. Even I might not. But then, I might. I try to enjoy what I do. I try to introduce real quality in it. I get sleepless nights if I don't work well, if I don't give it my hundred percent. Do you? I cannot switch off as soon as I am out of office. Can you? Its like saying that you stop thinking of God as soon as you are out of the temple. Or that you stop thinking about your wife and kids as soon as you are out of the house. Do you approach your work with the same sincerity that you would show to the most important thing in your life? After all, if you spend at least 1/3 of your life working, isn't it the most important thing in your life?

There is no other book that makes me think all this than Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance". And in that, what impresses me most is this extract from a speech by none other that Albert Einstein. Here's what he says...

In the temple of science are many mansions -- and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes.

Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers -- those who have found favor with the angel -- are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.What has brought them to the temple -- no single answer will cover -- escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.


Do you feel like this when you are working? If yes, then you are not working, you are enjoying your life. If you don't, you are just working, for the sake of working.