Of work worth doing WORK worth doing!

 

That is the precondition the iconic Theodore Roosevelt puts to get life’s best prize -- the chance to work hard. There are two spiritual catches in the statement that appears so simple and straight. One, the precondition of “work worth doing”; and two, “chance to work hard”! Both the expressions are extremely complicated. For, countless millions of people come into life as ones who are yet to find the actual purpose of life. And until they arrive at that point, they rarely find the work worth doing. And if they do not find that point on their life’s trajectories, how are they going to get what (former President of the United States and a paradoxical deep thinker in his cowboyish appearance) Theodore Roosevelt said “the best prize that life offers”! Now about the second catch -- the chance to work hard. This is where most are most likely to disagree. But it is a Victorian value -- or the ancient wisdom in all cultures -- the bliss in being able to work hard, so hard as to make one forget self. In other words, that happens only when one finds something so engaging that one tends to forget sense of self. That is a very high spiritual condition, so to say. It is then that life’s best prize is waiting for you -- the point when and where you are able to find something well above yourself, well beyond normal definitions, something in a sublime zone of surrender to something too iconic to be fathomed easily. But then, there is another way of looking at this thought. There was that legendary R  Stevenson who wrote in his longish expression “Mother and Son”: