To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Saturday, May 18, 2019
 
I incidentally had a conversation today with this lady who works in a general administration-coordination type role. We were on the subject of career choices and she happened to tell me that she had always wanted to be a teacher but she was glad that she didn’t finally walk down that path. Many of her friends were teachers and looking at their hectic lives and schedules and work-packed weekends and rare holidays, she felt that she had taken the right decision. Then she mentioned that even nurses have it very bad. My take was that people who got into these jobs must love their jobs enough to want to pursue them in spite of these severe challenges. She agreed and said that maybe she didn’t want it badly enough. It appeared that one had to choose a trade-off between having a mind-numbing or tedious or meaningless job or a job one didn’t enjoy but which granted enough time and money to enjoy life outside work, or alternatively, enjoying your job and finding meaning and fulfilment within it but not having the luxury of time or money to enjoy life outside work.
This conversation surfaced some thoughts that have been brewing inside my head for a while now…specifically in the context of the shift I made in my career at a crucial juncture into a field that is extremely difficult to find one’s feet in, and having found one’s feet, extremely difficult to keep head above water. It’s not that I didn’t expect it to be a tough course to embark upon but now that I know it is a hundred times more challenging than I imagined it would be, a hundred times more demanding of my time and energies, a hundred times more difficult to make my way through the competitive maze to survive let alone thrive, the question I ask myself off and on is whether I made the right decision or whether I was right mad! The answer strangely is always the same, that I couldn’t have made a better decision. I only wish I could have made this decision much earlier in life but when I consider how my life began (maybe I will talk about it some day on this blog)…when I consider my beginnings, I feel a mixture of shock and pride that I got here at all.
I never really thought about what is “ideal” work when I was working in the corporate world. Now that I reflect about it I realise “ideal” work must be something that you love doing “for its own sake” rather than for the sake of other ends be it pay or promotion or prestige or benefits or any of these things. When you find the ideal it won’t matter how demanding it is or exhausting it is or thankless it is…guess that explains why people become nurses or artists or even entrepreneurs… not everybody forges their own path or consciously chooses work that touches their mind, heart or soul in a higher sense but those who do likely experience moments of joy that those in far more comfortable roles struggle to find… and I would be so bold as to say that not having as much time or money for enjoyment outside of work doesn’t bother them as much maybe or not enough to regret their choices… because they find meaning and fulfilment in the work itself… why would they want to swap this for soulless work whose only attraction is the opportunities it presents to enjoy life outside of it?

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 1:45 am 0 comments
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