So I’m back at work, along with a large chunk of the office. It’s quite a change as last christmas I was part of the IT team for a manufacturing firm, now I’m in a large service company. The difference is pretty big, as manufacturing firms shut till January, but we provide 24×7 support. Several members of my family also have very little time off and are back at work.
I was thinking about the march to a 24×7 society, but also the speed things move at. What respite is there, where is the time for a little introspection?
I can’t shake the feeling that if people took the chance to stop and really think about things, they might not have chosen this path.
Lewis says:
Quite so, it shows an imbalance in the way the majority of people approach life - and we’re already seeing the kinds of consequence of not making enough introspection time. We often use the word “living”, as in earning a living or “what do you do for a living?” For many, life has become their work, in the sense that it takes up most of their time and energy leaving them little time for a “real” life. Of course, duality being as it is, there’s another side to that coin - we can talk about someone’s “life’s work”, where perhaps the benefit of doing that work is a true service: be it in healing, art, or simply mastery of a skill or craft. Then work can be viewed with deeper purpose, and need not be separated from the rest of one’s life.
Does this mean then, that it merely boils down to attitude? Something easily in our grasp to change where necessary?
28 December 2006, 11:14 amrtbarker says:
I never have liked the idea of someone’s work being their life. In some ways, I regret getting a job in IT, as computers were a hobby for me before they were a career, so in a way I spoiled a good hobby. For me, quite a few of my dreams lie outside of work.
The idea of a life’s work, a calling, sounds similar to the idea of doing your “True Will” in Thelema. Just recently, I’ve been having a nagging feeling that mine probably isn’t IT Support. My ex always seems to think I have healing hands, and that maybe I should have been a teacher or a counsellor, food for thought certainly!
You know, I almost took up Reflexology? I might revisit the idea.
29 December 2006, 12:58 pmLewis says:
There’s plenty of ideas about living doing one’s calling… the idea that each of us has within us some special gift, one thing that pleases our spirit…. of course, time changes, so this may or may not be something fixed throughout a lifetime. Whether there is truth in the idea I am not sure, but the upshot of it is that if we think about these things we might decide to embrace more of our potential than we would otherwise, asking more of life and so giving more as well.
Any experience brings with it learning which can be used at a later stage, so I don’t see being something other than what we might have been as necessarily a bad thing - I may never treat people professionally [I'm learning holistic massage at the moment, and I have done a short, though unaccredited course on reflexology - fascinating stuff!], but the things that I am learning about the body and myself and my relation to people and healing are immeasurably valuable regardless of the final outcome.
Tao speaks of balance - one must have a life outside of work, but one must also remember that work is a part of life.
30 December 2006, 2:53 pm