I have been recently fixating on a quote from Confucius :
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
Desperate not to work another day in my life, at work I funnelled all my energy into positive thoughts, just let annoying things go, and pushed myself to go with the flow with a little smile in my voice. My rationale was that I was aiming to reach a state of loving my work, so that I wouldn’t have to work a day in my life. I even agreed to Hot Desking a month ago, telling my manager that it would be a great opportunity to make new connections with colleagues that I hadn’t spoken with previously. She was impressed.
Soon after management instructed us to only log our hours from the time we turned on our computer in the morning, rather than the time we walked into the office. This basically caused people to run to their computer hubs upon entering the office, often without any greeting or even eye contact. The last straw was when the project I had been working on for two years made it to the finals of a prestigious workplace awards competition, and I wasn’t deemed worthy of an invite to the awards despite having designed a core component of it. When I questioned this, I was told that: “Oh no, there are so many more senior people in front of you to be invited”.
This was when I cracked. I concluded work was unlovable in the 21st century, and that Confucius’ saying was so 500 BC — impossible to make work in the bureaucratic milieu I have to deal with.
Having given up on loving my job, I have now decided to find more love in exercise, and that means The Bay Run. Inspirational quotes about exercise are more uplifting and relevant to life in the Inner West in 2017. An American entrepreneur, Jim Rohn advises: “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
This reassures me in the midst of Sydney’s spiralling housing costs, and makes me feel so much better about my inability to buy a property. Another quote from none other than the ancient Confucius genuinely puts a smile on my face all day: “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”
Perhaps he isn’t so BC after all — he has certainly made my Bay Run much more bearable.