But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.
Sometimes it__ hard to know when you__e crossed the line from conscientious to compulsive. When you__e in the thick of an assignment, it__ easy to believe that you must spend so much time brainstorming, researching, writing, testing, revising or what-have-you. Often, it__ only after you__e been working for hours on end that you realize that half the work you__e been doing wasn__ actually necessary and that you__e just wasted a lot of time.
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Sometimes it__ hard to know when you__e crossed the line from conscientious to compulsive. When you__e in the thick of an assignment, it__ easy to believe that you must spend so much time brainstorming, researching, writing, testing, revising or what-have-you. Often, it__ only after you__e been working for hours on end that you realize that half the work you__e been doing wasn__ actually necessary and that you__e just wasted a lot of time.
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When you are stressed on mind...to pour it out, is the behaviour, most kind!
If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend's early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, 'Good for you. We can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!
Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.