A Personal Etymology
Work is everything you do. It’s also often the things you don’t want to do.
As things do, the definitions of words change too. The whole study of etymology is based on this concept. When I was in school, work was to study. I had to direct my efforts to doing my best at school, to be sincerely dedicated to learning. It carried on over to the time I was pursuing my undergraduate degree. Work was to learn and apply the new things I learned in college. Work took on a different meaning when I started my job. Work now meant to perform at the firm, to complete tasks and to reach for more in order to grow.
Work meant doing what was expected of me to do relative to the age I was in life.
I’ve had a fairly positive ethic towards work for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, the general conclusion on the way I worked was that when I know things need doing and there’s no way out of it, I would finish and move ahead. During our summer vacations, we would be assigned holiday homework. My sister and I would sit with our mother and come up with a time table for the month and a half we had to play and well, work. I don’t recall what that discussion would have been like but I bet it was fun to be a fly on the wall. Once the schedule was found acceptable by all parties involved, we would decorate the sheet it was drawn on to go up on the almirah door.
I imagine that this was what formed the foundation of my skills to plan and organize the things I wanted to do and the things that simply needed to be done.
My grandfather lived by a principle that he would repeat to my sister and me, “work is worship”. Even when we’d moved away and spoke somewhere about once a week, he would make sure to mention the phrase. It was important to him. He was only a child when the partition of India took place, his family was uprooted from home, from everything they had built, from everything they had ever known. He had to start over in Delhi. I don’t know if he had any aspiration to be something specific, I do know he was a remarkable gymnast, but he had left that behind at what was home. He really did have a deep reverence for education and the work he did. It was obvious in the purely passionate way he spoke of his struggles with learning and the joy he derived from the labor of his job.
While I’m not so certain about worship, I do have a profound respect for work. Anything I decide to do, I believe is worth doing well.
Having an elder sister allowed me a preview of what I could expect from the next age. Watching her, I was in awe of how hardworking she is. Her sincerity to any task she picked up, from coloring the pages of a coloring book to how she was in the games we played with the neighborhood kids and her schoolwork was something I didn’t even realize when I had begun to admire. I thought if I was a fraction of how dedicated she is, I would be just fine.
From my parents I learned the importance of resilience. I can’t say that I take failure well, something I am working on, but in knowledge of the obstacles that were on their way and seeing now that they had overcome each of them partly in attribute to have kept going, it eases my acceptance of the understanding that things will be okay so long as I tell myself that I can make them so. In order to face challenges at any role of work, to be able to grow from and out of difficult situations, it helps to be resolute.
What work means to me now has evolved from simply expectations of roles. I love design and I get to practice it in a way everyday. I have a deep appreciation for the work I get to do at my job, but I won’t say that it defines me. I find it reasonable to admit that I won’t love every aspect of my job every day, but that all I have to do on those days is make it through to the next one.
Work is an extension of this job concept, it’s a large piece of the pie that life is. To cook, clean, plan, manage, upkeep, exercise, study, meditate, what one does at an office — all of it is work of some sort. We work on ourselves endlessly to be better. Work is a means to earn money, to facilitate attainment of leisure, even to support the pursuit of other work. Most of all, work is a medium of growth.
