“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.” -Alan Watts
I’ve always been a quiet observer. As a kid, I distinctly remember watching adults around me come and go to jobs that they didn’t appear to enjoy very much. Work, it seemed to me, was defined as some sort of drudgery a person exchanges for money– and money was a means of acquiring necessities and luxuries for a good life.
What I observed, however, was that adults didn’t seem to be all that happy. Nor did they have much time left over to enjoy the things their money bought. Mostly, they complained about all the things their money couldn’t buy. So, I made a promise to myself that when I grew up, whatever I did by way of work would be something I wanted to be engaged in. I had no desire to relive the patterns I saw in the adult world around me.
My work is not drudgery. It is also not necessarily a means of making money, which has never been a motivational force in my life. It’s simply what I feel compelled to do. And though it has not always been easy, somehow I’ve managed to maintain independence and integrity in my work and still have all my needs met at the end of the day. My work is a reflection of me.