I was sitting at my table this morning, thinking, pondering about the meaning of work. What is work? What does it mean to work? Our capitalistic environment may have perverted our understanding of what work is. Man was made to work. But work isn’t just physical. It is also, and mostly, spiritual. And when I say spiritual, i don’t mean religious. Spiritual in the sense of what the five senses cannot see or grasp. Thinking is spiritual. Using your imagination is spiritual. It is a matter of activities we cannot see with our two eyes. I cannot see what you are thinking. And yet, these activities end up dictating the actions we take on a daily basis. Whatever we see in the world is something whose seed started in someone’s mind.
Work should be an opportunity for meditation, a place for exploration. For us to learn about who we are, how we interact with others, to uncover what our motivations in life are, to understand how we view the world. It should be a tool for the refining of self. To help us build strength, courage, abnegation. To become better people, at the contact of other people, to make sound and wise decisions when faced with tough scenarios. Work is an opportunity to identify our strengths and our flaws. To spot the areas where we can improve and the areas we excel at. Work should be the tool that mold us into final form, like a sculptor working on wood, chipping away bit by bit until she achieves the desired outcome.
“Work should be an opportunity for meditation, a place for exploration”
Unfortunately, today’s capitalistic environment has turn us into machines. Machines constantly doing and not thinking enough. We’re being measured based on productivity, with little regard to the quality of our output. This causes us to continuously focus on the action, without giving enough thought to the plan, the causes and effects of said plan, so that we can make the right decisions, and finally take the right actions.
One thing we forget is that we make up the collective, and for things to change, it has to start with us at the individual level. It has to start with us having a purpose-based economy (I will write another article to expand on that) , where we don’t work 40 hours+ a week, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week so we have enough money to pay for rent, food and other expenses, all while our soul has dissociated from whatever we’re doing at work. Where we work somewhere because we believe in our talents and what we’re bringing to the table, where we work somewhere because we like what we do, where we work somewhere because that’s what we want – not what we feel we’re forced to do.
This environment will easily create the conditions for us to slow down, to think about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It will take us away from the rampant stress we see and feel in today’s professional landscape. It will give us more room to be more intentional about our thoughts and actions, because we care more.
While this might sound like an utopia, it still believe that we can start taking action today for work to be more meaningful for us, and to serve as a tool for self-improvement.
Take some time today to:
- Write down your strengths
- Make a list of your flaws and areas for improvement
- Carve out 15 min in your day for meditation. Think about your colleagues and how you can create better relationships with them
- Think about a project you’re working on or a customer/partner you’re helping, what can you do to make a positive difference on the project or the experience you’re providing?
- What hardships have you face lately, and how did you react? Did you like the way you approached it, or what do you think you could have done differently?
- What things have you done that made you feel proud of yourself or left you with a sense of accomplishment?
Now, I’m not saying all the work has to be on us to create this environment, it will also be incumbent on companies to be more focused on service and not so much on profit, but this will mean the crumbling of the very fabric of American (and the world?) society, and this may be beyond the scope of this article, but my hope is to help my readers find balance in the chaos, and find more quiet in this cacophony of stress, and help contribute to the establishment of a better work environment.
More to come.
