I learned to work. Being raised by people who Worked (the capital letter is intentional), life was a little whispered voice in my childhood—work was the loudest and most dominant. My father owned a neighborhood grocery store, which was his father’s before him. My dad grew up in the store, as did my sister and I. My parents—bless them!—worked side by side, seven days a week. When not at the store, we talked about the store and we worried about the store. We snuck away on stolen vacations and held our collective familial breath, that all would be okay—in the store.
Learning to work was a good thing for me. Decades later, I am focused, attentive, committed, and extraordinarily effective in what I do. And I also struggle with down-time, fight relaxation, and am truly baffled by the potential of retirement.
Who might I be, if I not be: coach/teacher/writer? Who might Aruni be, without those expressions of my being?
Because I have no answers, I am practicing the wild and wacky inquiry of “non-doing and grace”. In the words of Rishi Prabhakar, “There is nothing to do to get to enlightenment. There is no knowledge, no special learning required. No amount of doing will take us there. In fact, it only happens when we STOP DOING and STOP TRYING.”
Stop doing? Stop trying? Wow, what an invitation.
To the worker-bees amongst us: what will you do today, to unplug? To stop? To relax into the grace that simply is? How can you rest and watch and notice? Dear worker-bee, how can you just be today?