Sigmond Freud says “Love and work are two pillars of human happiness.” He is a wise guy, so I will take his word for it. And I do see his point - having someone to love and seeing that love reciprocated makes your heart full in a way that the fat from mcd burgers could never (they only manage to fill one’s arteries). Despite all the horrors of this world, love makes this planet seem like a manageable place. And cherry on top is, in addition to finding such love, when one also has a work where they can meaningfully contribute to the society. I can only imagine the wonders it does to their self-esteem. I personally never shy away from loving and working. But love sometimes confuses me, makes me cry, and breaks my heart. In this case, love is not exactly being an enabler of good work. So maybe it is about time we retire Freud (I know he’s dead, I meant to retire his statement).
But there’s an alternate thought process I keep hearing from
the modern world. It is to combine love and work (No, it doesn’t mean loving your
coworker). It says to find love and contentment in the work you are doing. It’s
not easy though, work is not pretty and doesn’t have a sweet melodious voice which
can quieten the ringing sound in my ears. I digress, but my main point was it
is not always easy for me to like the work I am doing. But then I remember the
words of the great man and an even greater bongo player, Richard Feynman. He
says that nearly everything is interesting enough if one deeply immerses
themselves in that task. And I like this way of looking at the work. I in fact have
Feynman’s original quote on a sticky note pasted to my monitor, so I can be
reminded every day that I don’t have to actively love the work I am about to start.
I can just try to do it diligently with attention, and give it a chance to
sweep me off my feet. But I do have an enemy in my head who blurs my chain of
thoughts, and tries to steer me off the track with unrelated random thoughts,
like the ones I had about love and work this morning when I was procrastinating
the main work task I was set to do.
I sometimes wonder how all these genius scientists manage to
think wonderfully complicated thoughts without procrastination. I wonder how
Albert Einstein did it. I read in a book yesterday that his general relativity concept
is easily the most beautiful and brilliant thought that occurred to any human
in the history of our planet so far. I hope over the course of my life, I can have
a thought whose brilliance matches at least 10% of general relativity’s. I did
have one thought this morning while I was in the middle of the love and work
procrastination thinking stream, which is not brilliant, but I’d say okayish.
It goes like – Loneliness can sometimes (but not always) be caused by the absence of people in
that moment, and it feels like a rough cold wind smacking you in the face in
middle of December. But solitude is when you manage to fill that moment
completely with yourself, and it feels like a cool ocean breeze gently caressing
your face in harsh summer. Let me make this even more weird by asking you to
think of it as a shadow. Shadow in a literal sense is absence of light, which
is sad. But I do have wonderful memories of playing with shadows as a kid when
there was a power cut at my home. I used to block the light rays originating
from a candle and falling onto a wall, by putting my palm between them. And I
then used to make all these interesting shapes to recreate various scenes with
shadows on the wall. I still sometimes try to create a dog head shape out of a shadow
when I notice a light ray falling on a wall. At least I am doing this shadow dog
creation task out of pure love, and I wonder what Freud and Feynman will say
about it.
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