BUDDHA ON WORK July 4, 2010
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Buddha says, “Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.” I wish someone had told me this a long time ago….
CURIOSITY AND WORK November 1, 2008
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In his memoir, Touch and Go, Studs Terkel wrote, “My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: ‘Curiosity did not kill this cat.’ I took a vacation once–it involved a beach–and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life.” He published his memoir in November 2007 and died a year later when he was 96.
THE WRITING LIFE June 22, 2006
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Garret Keizer has just gotten a Guggenheim Fellowship for Nonfiction. According to the Chronicle of Barton, “On a good day, he gets up early and starts to write in earnest after his wife has left for work. It’s tough though to avoid being distracted by other responsibilities when the workday is dictated largely by yourself, and when the work is such that it might, or might not, actually make some money. So he asks himself, if I worked at Tap and Die would I be doing this at two in the afternoon? No, he’d be working, and the laundry and the lawn would simply have to wait. The same idea of work has to apply to writing. On the other hand, he said, he sometimes gets his best ideas while stacking wood or mowing the lawn. ‘To do this, or any other kind of self-employment, you’re making a trade-off.’ A self-employed man once told him, ‘I work 60 hours a week for myself so I don’t have to work 40 hours a week for someone else.’ It’s a philosophy Mr. Keizer relates to…. ‘Other people dream of getting rich so they won’t have to work anymore,’ he said. ‘Artists and writers want to get rich so they can keep working. Doing what I want to do has been gratifying.’”
WORK AND PLAY April 14, 2006
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Arnold Toynbee said, “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”
DARWIN ON HIMSELF February 12, 2005
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In his Autobiography, Darwin says several very humble and touching things about himself. Some of the passages I’ve marked include such comments as: “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit…. I am a poor critic …. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited …. My memory is extensive, yet hazy ….” But then he talks about how hard he works: “I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts…. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts ….” Later he says: “…it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that ‘I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this’….” When I myself am feeling like a drone, I like to re-read what Darwin said about himself….
