Love what you do
I was listening to a story on NPR about a lady who trains search and rescue dogs. One of the listeners calling in explained that he had days where he just didn’t feel like working and he’d rather play solitaire in his cubicle, then he asked what happened when the dogs didn’t feel like working that day. There was a pause, then the lady said she’d never seen that happen. She said that to the dogs, it’s not work. You need to love what you do. Not that anyone’s asked me, but if you did, that’d be my career advice.
I like what I do. Mondays don’t suck, I never dread “going into work”, I never watch the clock, I like the work — but I have to like my work, I can’t imagine going to a job for 40-60 hours a week and hating what I do. I get to do different stuff all the time, there isn’t much BS I have to deal with very often, and I’ve been doing this for around 15 years and I still have an amazing amount of stuff to learn.
Madeleine L’Engle wrote about the difference between chronos and kairos, she said this:
“Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
“Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.”
For me, a lot of my day is spent in kairos, that moment where I’m lost in what I’m doing. That’s my favorite thing about my “work”.
Some other fun work related quotes:
“One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work, and how to love, to work for the person one loves, and love one’s work.” — Tolstoy
“We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.” — Madeleine L’Engle
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for — in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” — Ellen Goodman