It’s great being alive, isn’t it?
There’s just one problem.
The problem being, you don’t get it for free.
You pay to be alive. In full. And you pay for it in the coin commonly known as “suffering”.
“Life is suffering” is the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and the Christian cross is a symbol of a similar idea. The human condition isn’t pretty.
Being rich or famous won’t help you, at least not for long. Everybody gets old, everybody gets sick, everybody dies.
That having been established, we need to ask a simple question.
Is it worth it?
And if so, how do we prove it to ourselves? How do we find the meaningful stuff that offsets the crap we need to go through?
There are plenty of religious answers to this. And no end of self-help books and magazine articles in a lesser vein.
But a more conclusive answer will be found, I believe, in our actions. We can get the biggest insights in the world from the great traditions, but in the end, we have to live our actual lives here and now.
Including, of course, at our jobs.
Which is why we allow ourselves to get so upset over work issues, even if it’s “just a paycheck”.
Because work actually does matter. And only a fool or conman thinks otherwise.
