Reflections #0011
Working and Learning
I jokingly qualify myself as a workaholic and a nerd. I like to work and learn. I spend most of my day in engaging in one of these, separately or together. As I find meaning and joy in doing this, I have often reflected on the question — “In doing what I am doing, what I am really doing?”.
Work as service
In the highly interconnected and interdependent world, we live in it is nearly impossible to discern the impact of our actions. The linear cause and effect cannot be established. The limitations of the human mind ensure that an objective understanding of reality is obscure. I have often reflected on engaging with the world in a limiting scenario like this.
Working long hours has been my comfort zone. My family upbringing has instilled values of labour in me. Growing up, I saw my parents work hard to provide a decent lifestyle for our family. Not once they complained. I think they got it from their parents as well. A sincere work ethic, along with a sense of responsibility means I end up working harder and longer than most people around. For a long time, I felt pride in this. Until one day, when I realised that I was using my gifts to block parts of myself. In trying to do more of one thing, I was closeting the other. External appreciation and rewards followed which further reinforced this cycle. For many years, I was unaware that I was using my work as an escape.
Service is about making the every day extraordinary and doing this not with a fiction of imagination but with a real sense of connection and understanding. When you know that you cannot really know, a sense of humility and reverence follows. When I am serving, I am not responding to my ego; instead, I am grateful for the opportunity I have received. When I look at my work as a service towards the whole, I can stay detached and not worry much about specific expected and unexpected outcomes. I do my best and surrender to nature for taking care of the rest.
When I stopped working to run away from something else, I also discovered that work is not separate from life for me. For example, organs in my body never demand the mythical work-life balance. All nature follows a rhythm dictated by simple laws. These days I find myself trying to comprehend those laws and synchronise my diurnal and annual cycles with life.
Learning to Live and Lead with Love
Like many people today, I spend more than 20 years of my life in the protected yet closed environments of schools and colleges. Towards the end of my education, I felt deeply conflicted between my purpose (which I hadn’t discovered then) and the norms and expectations from a university degree. I would see many of my friends running after multinational jobs and high-paying salaries without a second thought about it. They would work hard to clear some competitive exams so they could secure better opportunities to earn more money and influence in the world. I also followed the career path well into my late twenties. I stopped when I realised that the transactional nature of learning is not human.
Learning is as fundamental as sleep and food. Your body and mind cannot function without it. The education institutions allow for accidental or at best incidental learning. In my opinion, learning is joyful only when it is intentional. You can’t force someone to learn. At best, you can create a learning environment which can spark someone’s curiosity. Immense possibilities exist from there. For me, a learning cycle begins with curiosity and ends with transformation.
Beyond skills and competencies, learning is about growing as a human being for me. It includes expanding my awareness of the world and making better contributions to it. As a small but significant part of nature and a member of the human family, I wish to leave it at a better place than I found it. Since I cannot know when the hour of death will arrive, I want to live each moment in a way that nourishes the whole.
When I am looking at my work as service and learning as living, I know that they are not separate categories as I perceive them. Every moment becomes an opportunity to be in service and grow from within. Life never stops evolving or creating. It continues to nurture at all times. When I realised this, I stopped separating learning, living and leading. It has been an interesting journey so far.
Two questions which have been helpful for me are — “For me, What is work and what is not work?”, “What is my relationship with work?” Do share your reflections on what working and learning means to you and how do they connect.
