Freud and Feynman

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.