A thing,
until it is everything,
is noise,
And once it is everything,
is silence.
– Antonio Porchia
I found this beautiful interpretation of life from Antonio Porchia. Such a profound thought shared so beautifully.
A similar sentiment is expressed by Khalil Gibran in the following lines:
“When God threw me, a pebble
into this wondrous lake,
I disturbed the surface with countless circles.
But when I reached the depths,
I became very still.”
Does your work make you a better human being?
The work we do and the stuff we accumulate are much like adding more zeros to life. There is no end to it and the sum total of all you accumulate is still zero.
Haven’t we all seen miserable millionaires and poor people (materially) who are blessed with contentment?
In a world where you can do almost anything you want to, our choice becomes ever more important. And it is the choice of doing the work that not only makes a bigger difference to the outer world but also enriches your inner world as a human being.
We see people doing menial mundane jobs with great joy and we see people in meaningful and deep work doing it with a feeling of drudgery.
Work itself means little, unless we assign a meaning to it. It is pretty much like a stone cutter who thinks he is busy building a cathedral. Stone cutting is mundane, building a cathedral is not.
It is this kind of work, and the meaning we assign to it, that adds a one before all the zeros. That which makes all the other zeros meaningful and valuable.
That is how we create value in life. Not by simply accumulating stuff and external validations. But by also doing the work that makes us a better human being.
