The Bounty of Knowledge

Listening to Mozart on a rainy Saturday afternoon, sitting idly under my bedroom window, catching shafts of light through its curtains, dipping in and out of a Paul Theroux book--such are the simple pleasures that make life worthwhile. Rare pleasures that I indulge in on weekends.

Weekends provide a much-welcome respite from the punishing exertions of the workday week. However my weekends are often filled with leftover work--work that requires special care and insight from a state of mind unatainable on a typical day at the office.

I'm not in love with work, nor do I indulge in it as a form of escapism. Like a professional footballer who needs to play regularly to be match-fit, I welcome work as an opportunity to keep myself mentally fit at all times. Too much work induces fatigue; too little work makes one mentally sluggish. Like any athlete, one needs to find the right balance.

So much of life is seeking this elusive balance: between work and play; between pain and pleasure--the psychological piston that drives one towards one's goals in life, pulverising obstacles along the way.

Perhaps I work a little bit too much, often with too little rewards. That's fine. I've mentioned it elsewhere in my blog before: my dictum is that no work is ever wasted--one's reward from work comes from the knowledge one gets in the process. It is what keeps me going all these years. It is the bounty of knowledge that I relish in, at the end of a hard week's work.