Tag: Love

Hunger

“There is hunger for ordinary bread and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much” – Mother Teresa. 
While I was writing this, I was thinking of so many of my friends & acquaintances. It stuck me also that I (& very likely you too) are no different in our hunger. 
Cloistered indoors thanks to an invisible enemy, we humans all crave for all the things we miss. And there’s no one to rail against. The virus doesn’t really care how rich you are, what color your skin is, how good the healthcare system in your country is. (It doesn’t seem to stop humans railing against each other though). 
Regardless of the progress we humans have made, our poverty as Mother Teresa says, continues unabated. There are occasional pockets of love, of kindness, of thoughtfulness and they are the virus I hope spread faster than the contemporary one. 

Work that you love

Is that an oxymoron?

Really, if it’s work, can you love it?
And if you love it, is it work?

Pedantic questions aside, what is it that I really enjoy about my work?

For much of my last two decades, my identity has been defined by my qualifications & work. In direct contrast to how I thought of myself for the previous two decades of my life. I loved art, music, life in general. I drew my energy from the world around me, from books, from sketching & cartooning, from spending time in nature, observing things around me, curiosity driving many of my questions, & driving the adults in charge mad. I loved solving problems, words, cross-words, puzzles & math. I loved the idea of travel, the idea of meeting my idols, the idea of learning new things.

While I didn’t have much of a choice in the path I ended up on, it started a course of events in my life that didn’t make any sense at the time, but in retrospect, have been perfect. Maybe that’s the case of most people, if not everyone. For two decades,  I tried to find every avenue to learn & do things other than what I had “qualifications” to do. Not  being formally accountable  for these things was a double-edged sword: I could experiment with my learning, but I would forever remain a dilettante.

Today, I find myself doing work I love. I get to work with words, help apply math to real-world puzzles & problems, to learn. I occasionally get to travel, & rather than just meet my idols, I get to meet amazing people every day.

What isn’t to love?

How to tell love from passion – a timeless litmus test [Article]

Maria Popova pulls out this timeless classic by James Thurber & EB White:

“By and large, love is easier to experience before it has been explained — easier and cleaner.”

and another excerpt:

Let us say you have sat down to write a letter to your lady. There has been a normal amount of preparation for the ordeal, such as clearing a space on the desk … and the normal amount of false alarms, such as sitting down and discovering that you have no cigarettes. (Note: if you think you can write the letter without cigarettes, it is not love, it is passion.) Finally you get settled and you write the words; “Anne darling.” If you like commas, you put a comma after “darling”; if you like colons, a colon; if dashes, a dash. If you don’t care what punctuation mark you put after “darling,” the chances are you are in love — although you may just be uneducated, who knows?