“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir
This quote sums up where I find myself most of each waking day. While I am firmly grounded in being a woman, all other thoughts expressed by Simone de Beauvoir could, in fact, be mine.
Work is…beyond work. Period. Added to the equation, family, relationships and dealing with life, overall. My passion for writing has become more work and I struggle to regain the pleasure of sharing my creative thoughts. Juggling my way through the maze of it all, I want only to find some small bit of satisfaction, you know, that feeling of accomplishment? Does wanting this somehow make me greedy or perhaps an underachiever? It sure makes me angry as hell and then mad because I allowed that negative emotion to take charge.
That tired old idiom, “One step forward, two steps back” is a flashing neon light over my head. Constantly. Well, almost.
Unlike many people today, I can work. Two jobs, in fact. Something to be grateful for, especially in this mudslide of an economy. My brain goes into overtime, usually waking me in the middle of the night to remind me that I left a few stones unturned and I jump out of bed to make necessary corrections. More gratitude. At least my brain hasn’t deserted me. Yet.
Life. Well, the ups and downs are never-ending. For all of us, it seems. It takes a fair amount of work to sit in that roller coaster ride of conflict, heartbreak, exhaustion and beyond, just trying to get through one more day. It’s often work to deal with situations that spiral out of control, orchestrated by people with no real clue on a given situation or motivated by some personal, twisted, vendetta. And, it’s work to just stand back, count to ten (maybe twenty) and feel empathy for everyone caught in the combative side of life. Makes you a better person, right?
All in all, work is nothing more than a transfer of energy, mental and physical. We define its progress, success and failure. It’s part of life, a necessary evil, at times.
No one ever said it would be easy!
I couldn’t pass on this inspiration from Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop….”Write a blog post inspired by the word: work”. And, I did!
