Does it really matter what we "do"?

“I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as making a ‘life.”

Maya Angelou

I spent so much time trying to figure out what to do. And it’s important to do that. Finding fulfilling work can change our life. And we need to do whatever it takes as we go through life to find the profession which resonates with us. But even when you find that fulfillment in a job, sustaining that fulfilling feeling can seem like a struggle.

Most of your working life will be spent worrying about something that happened at work.  Our workplaces become the center where we leave a lot of our own energy behind. We feel depleted when we return back home and try to get back our lost energy from people at home - draining them in the process. Work becomes an enormously serious place and we can attribute a lot of our premature gray hair to work and the psychosomatic as well as physical changes it brings about by virtue of the stress and anxiety it brings about in our lives.

What if I told you that at the end, the job you are so stressed about, wouldn't matter if you were a project manager or a gardener. When it comes to evaluation of life, if there is such a thing, it is simply how our life impacted other lives. I have had the good and bad fortune of being a part of a few memorial services. These beautiful ceremonies are meant to celebrate the life of the departed. When friends and family come up to speak, there is no mention of their occupation or the titles they held. In none of those services have I heard someone say “She did a great job as a Director of so and so company” or “he was an excellent Vice President at Company Y”. They talk about their personalities, their quirks, idiosyncrasies and how the departed person impacted his/her life. Friends and family reminisce about how they were the life of the party, how they always listened - things that seem very day -to-day in our lives but we realize how important these are when they are gone from our lives. It’s amazing how in life and death, the value we attribute to things reverse so effortlessly.

My friend Gina was a special lady. We both sat across from each other at work for a year and became close friends. It’s difficult to define Gina. She was weird, in a good way. Outspoken, fearless, authentic, -she lived with her dog who she loved to pieces. From the outside, she lived a lonely life but she always smiled and shared stories of her travel and strange encounters and varied experiences. At the age of 48, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was in the hospice within five months of diagnosis. Death was imminent, there was no denying that and she started a blog to write about her last few months on this planet. The posts were funny but more importantly indicative about her acceptance of the situation. She surrendered completely to the process of passing. In her funeral service, her friends and family spoke at length what a wondrous thing  her humor was. How it brought down the house. They talked about so many things in service to others that I didn’t know. No one talked about what a great content strategist she was(which she was) and that she worked for big corporations.

The measure of life is really only about life and the work that we do, our jobs may be a part of our lives but does not really qualify as life itself. We are all playing parts here. Its how we, including our jobs brings about a change in other people. What you do doesn’t matter, it’s how you touch others with what you do - that’s the real deal.

My plea is not trying to convince you or me to get that education or work hard to get that job. Instead, it is to focus on the impact of our work. We get consumed by the cycles of our jobs - from one promotion to the other, we feel we are being measured in life and of life by our progressively increasing titles. And that we fail if we don’t keep moving forward. This illusion about what the true measure of life is frustrating and confusing. And to know that we only realize this for ourselves when we are dead, is truly a waste of life. So, next time when you get passed over for that promotion, instead of feeling dreadful and giving up on life, let’s do something nice for someone, be of service for an hour - when our life is being measured, the lost title will not feature anywhere but that hour of kindness or that moment of service will never be forgotten and the impact will reverberate through generations in unimaginable ways.