Let work become an obsolete term

Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never be able to get out of it alive anyways. This saying has been doing the rounds on the internet. It sounds like a Sufi’s words with some amount of truth. We do take life a tad too seriously without even realizing the fact. In fact, we are tuned to taking it seriously right from our childhood.
At around four years, we are pushed into the more organized system of snatching away our thinking capabilities — schooling — and we start counting and adding and subtracting without even understanding why. By the time we pass out of 12th grade, we are in a mad race, filled with anxieties and fears about the future. We can’t even figure out when the race began or where it’ll end… but we still run.
We think we are running for our future, a secure future, for a future where there’ll be a big car, a posh house, branded clothes, foreign trips, cruises and the works. We run with the hope that this will ensure happiness. We run for money, for that is the symbol of security, or so we think, looking through the lens of an education system that taught us counting, addition and subtraction, instead of questioning. A few enjoy the run. But most run out of fear of being left behind. And somewhere from anonymity, a grungy mystic proclaims, “The past is gone, the future may never be mine, the present is all that I have.” He seems to be pointing towards the dilemma that keeps churning within… quite often without even being conscious of it. The anxieties of securing a ‘happy’ future (which may never happen) mixes well with the depression and tiredness of running a race that seems to end.
The mind is already numb and hypnotized by the clockwork routine of a morally loaded thing they call ‘work’, which we have come to accept as ‘our reason for existence’. No thinking, just mindless working, yes-bossing and then partying. And when the guru questions: What is work? We struggle to find an answer with words such as ‘what we do for a living’. The guru smiles and says: What is life then? We think, but words fail us. The guru smiles, for, there is no such thing as work. Birds fly in search of food everyday. They build nests when they need to. But no one pays them a wage, so it’s not work.
They just live life. They fly to be happy and fly when they need to, not because a slave driver orders them to or throws money at them. Life is the path we are running on. If we start enjoying the run, or if we run the path we want to, then ‘work’ shall become an obsolete term. We’ll enjoy every moment of it, even when we are sweating and tired… for it will be our life then. And money, of course, will follow. But, for that we need to shed our fear. We need to believe in our ability to fly. We need to let our mind fly and follow it, wherever it takes us.(Courtesy: Parvez Imam - Financial Chronicle {the writer is a psychiatrist, film maker and traveler}).