Technically I was working all day today, and that’s not supposed to be good. After all, today is a Saturday, half a weekend, a widely recognized day of rest.
I say “technically” because I came in to the lab this morning to work on something I really enjoy doing, and ended up staying the entire day. I didn’t come into work today because I had to, but because I wanted to. I was working, but I was also playing.
Maybe we need some other word, one not as laden with other meanings as “work”. Perhaps somebody could coin a new word to describe the act of working on one’s profession while also being in a continual state of utter bliss.
Montessori explicitly used the term “work” when talking about what young kids do. She said that, even though others might call it “play”, it is important developmental work for the young child. So… with that frame of mind, I’m right there with you 🙂
In Latin based languages the word means literally “to suffer”, so one could use an existing word defining this state of in-between (or perfect) bliss like “flow” and work (eheh) with that.
Let’s see: flow gives “fluere” in latin, sounding a bit like “fleur” (flower) in French but more so like “fluer” (flies) in Danish. Sadly we’re too accustomed to the sound of work, so we add a ‘k’ to make it more like home : we are now fluerking, a strange mix between two voluptuous states.
Maybe we might prefer to forget words and stay in this unlabelled welcome poetic void untouched by human concepts forged into dictionaries.