Dear Diary,
There are periods in life when it seems everyone has forgotten about you. And, thank God, there are periods when suddenly everyone remembers you – possible and impossible ones. Such were the past few days. Yesterday evening, after the phone finally fell silent following a flood of calls and messages, I pushed the keyboard away and blissfully leaned back in my chair – it was peaceful and good. Everyone who had reached out received a result exceeding their expectations and, having rewarded me with every possible expression of gratitude, skipped away happily back into the whirlwinds of their lives. “How I love my work…”, I thought, and then, since I have a tremendous, perhaps even morbid attraction to good states, I began hastily analyzing the component parts of the situation, so I could summon that thought and that state for myself as often as possible.
What aroused my suspicion was that the nature of the work was seemingly the same as a decade ago, as two decades ago, yet I wouldn’t say it brought only such emotions throughout all that time. On the contrary, rummaging through memory, far more unfaded frames emerge when the very same activity brought cardinal opposite emotions. So the reason lies not in the mechanical act of writing code or shuffling images and texts. Then in what? A well-chosen radio station playing in the background? Perfectly adjusted desk and room lighting? A delightful lunch? What is that ingredient that transforms work into something for which, without waiting for February fourteenth, you can confess to having warm feelings for it?
People! It is people for whom you do that work who make it lovable. And it is people who make it unlovable as well. The inquiries of people you sincerely respect bring you joy. You are delighted when you are given opportunities to make their lives even more beautiful, to make them even happier. You are delighted by the moment when they radiate with gratitude. I cannot say precisely what love is in general, but in this place it seems I am speaking of exactly that.
This is what makes any activity, any work lovable – not the process itself, not the mechanical writing of code or shuffling of images and texts, and not even the financial reward for it, but the value it will bring to another. And the opposite. You don’t love your work? Only because you don’t love the people for whom you do it.
Simple :-)
