I often wish my job was my primary part of my life. I’m not saying, of course, that I want to be a workaholic. I mean, if I was doing a dream job, spending the majority of time on the job must have been ideal. I remember I wrote something like this in an old post. Unfortunately, my current job is way far from my dream job (not like the distance between Halifax and Vancouver but between Toronto and Mars). It “occupies” the majority of my day excluding sleeping (I guess this is why it is called occupation), and it is the most unpleasant time for me. When something at work irritates me, I tell myself “nothing personal” in my mind, and when I get on my car to leave the work place, I loudly tell myself “I forgot that”.
One of the things I do at work is to ask supervisors to select a weekly MVP worker and to do some paper work for that. I often need to urge them to do it for some reasons, which is quite unpleasant for me and probably for them in some degree as well. When it happens, I tell myself “nothing personal”. But when every MVP has been selected, paper work has been done, and a manager announces the MVP workers, everyone smiles. Their smile makes me happy. I could think this is something personal.
I could say “not only unpleasant things but happy things also happen, so this job is good”. This is so called positive thinking, which I think does not help a lot. The premise of positive thinking, I think, is that you can judge everything to be either positive or negative, like “half full” or “half empty”, and that thinking positively is a good attitude. Really? I prefer to, or in other words I wish I could, see everything as it is. The attempt to interpret everything as something positive or negative can be a cause of unpleasant feeling. Buddhism tells 色即是空、空即是色 (something is nothing, nothing is something), and this is probably what I need now. As for the “half full” or “half empty” issue, the premise of positive thinking is that being full is positive and being empty is negative. Can’t we see everything as it is? Nothing is positive, nothing is negative, nothing is personal.
As I wrote in a previous post, what I experience now will eventually form myself for the future. Whether it is something personal or business, it will form my personality. It seems better to see everything as it is and select what to be. Let’s see.