when work isn’t play

Come Thursday, and there’s a weekend vibe already. I mean, Wednesday. So yeah it is a good three days of work until Wednesday 2PM and then it’s only smooth sailing.

– exactly the escapist in me talking, each week.

Otherwise, the monologue is about making the next day tolerable. Either way, it sounds like a sorry way to live and I’ve known it too well.

Like this one, we experience patches of desert. A kind of emotional dryness envelops us, leaving us craving a certain nourishment. As one walks this isolated stretch, the knowledge of what one misses and truly wants, begins to fade. Perhaps you never knew the answer to that; which a whole another matter, but a bit more serious than everyday forgetfulness, is when you forget that YOU are lost. Not like lost due to a faulty Google Maps, no! This is a stealthy, more serious kind of lost – in a territory whose map is anyone’s guess.

Welcome life.

Such are testing times easily recognizable. Even a seasoned adventurer only eventually realizes that his hopes were at first misplaced. Because uncertainty and surprise creeps us all just the same! A novice navigating inside a jungle will find himself walking in a circle. Journey a desert alone and at least one mirage is bound to misguide you. It has to be that we travelers, adventurers, fellow nomads and cartographers of life, also began this mysterious game as amateurs.

However, do we get to finish this adventure and return home? Or are we too far from shore already? Where is the checkpoint and how am I to know?

We may never ultimately be certain of anything, but I want to give this platitude the benefit of doubt and go further and ask – can we be sure that we cannot know something for sure? Oh, this can go on – an infinite regress.

It’s less of a search for certainty than it is a search for meaning. There are numerous certainties that make our lives and which truly are overlooked by our novelty-seeking minds. This way, my predicament of work not being play may be resolved by a simple suggestion of trying a vocation that’s closer to my heart! Whatever that means. Or continue punishing myself, so that every melancholic moment throws me into a fit of writing I can share with the world.

To me this exactly is play – flying away into a philosophical reverie. To soar the open skies of imagination until landing gracefully with a palatable truth which I most probably have read before, heard before and thought of before. What would I have gained? Not sure! And that’s the point of play. That there is no point.

Today my work isn’t play and it’s still Tuesday, but tomorrow it could be nicer. If anything, this thought exercise made me a lot more hopeful and a bit more… thoughtful.

What is your favorite insight? And how did you come upon it?

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