– Ram Dass
Rama, of course, is an Indian name for the divine.
When you do what you love for a living you’re more in tune with the Universe and its divine aspects. When you don’t do what you love for a living, in part because you’re disconnected from the highest in you, it stands to reason that you’re not going to be as happy as those whose work feels like play. The work that such people do, I have long referred to as not a livelihood, but a lovelihood.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen far more absenteeism in the workplace among employees than I have among the many entrepreneurs who I’ve come to know in my three decades of self-employment. This is hardly surprising. My conclusion: when you don’t like what you do for 40 hours or more per week it’s easy to get sick to your stomach having to do 10 commutes to a job you barely tolerate, and then spend most of your day doing the work there that either bores you or downright depresses you. The entire ordeal can easily weaken your im mune system, making it more susceptible to invading germs and viruses. Nobody likes to get sick, but the 40-yearold worker, much like the 10-year-old student he was three decades before, doesn’t mind missing a few days of work, much like he missed a few days of school. It’s a price an adolescent would pay to miss class, it’s also a price an adult would pay to miss work.
On the other hand, doing what you love for money makes you happier than doing what you dislike for a living, and most likely strengthens your immune system.
Who has time to get sick when there’s so much enjoyable work to do? If Aesop were analyzing this phenomenon, he might have created a fable for it and most certainly a moral as well. It might be: jobs you don’t like your body doesn’t like either. And work you love your body loves, too.
So how does work you don’t like affect you mentally and emotionally, and, correspondingly, what’s the influence of dharma on your mind and heart? We’re not yet evolved enough as a culture to simply Google such statistics because, while we do have a bureau of Labor Statistics, we don’t yet have a Bureau of Happiness Index like the Asian nation of Bhutan. This small country of just under three quarters of a million people has 33 indicators for happiness over nine domains: psychological wellbeing, health, education, time use, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards.
Once again anecdotally, I’ve met quite a large number of people who don’t like their jobs, who – perhaps as a result? – create an awful lot of drama in their lives. I think of them as melodrama junkies, because, like characters in soap operas, they so often find themselves in weird financial and emotional scrapes and unpleasant relationships.
While I’m not suggesting that all those who do the work they love – who rate high on the dharma scale, if such a chart existed – are free of melodrama. But my experience of such people is that they tend more toward mellow than melo-drama. More toward joy than oy. And more toward fun than funk.
If the dharma they practice is their spiritual dharma, in addition to their career dharma, and they’re growing toward enlightenment, then they tend to enjoy an even greater score in the areas of mellow, joy and fun than job haters do. And they also tally a much lower rating in the areas of melodrama, oy and funk than those who have to force themselves out of bed every weekday to their jobs.
Those pursuing their dharma spiritually enjoy a more mellow state of being than job haters because the higher Self within, that central core of their inner Being, is a realm of pure peace, infinite consciousness, and bliss.
Consequently, mellow predominates over melodrama.
And so I conclude with a simple question: Would you rather be a drama queen or a king of comedy? You make the choice.