Work is
indeed God’s gift .Without it life will become meaningless, a veritable, Work
here, doesn’t stand for every sort of activity. Only useful and noble activity
is blessed. Negative action is a curse. Work of Carlyle’s conception who is the
author of the saying in question is something positive and constructive,
howsoever, low or mean it may be in the eyes of the public. The sweeper’s work
is as much sacred as that of any other professional. Joseph Conrad rightly
remarked:”A man is a worker. If he is not he is nothing.” In fact, a man cannot
live without work. Great men believe in work, hard work and long hours of work.
A busy man is a healthy man. Idleness
tells upon health. Intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if they were
poor, while the rich women for the most part keep themselves busy with
innumerable, trifles of whose earthshaking importance they are firmly
persuaded. Even the suprannauted persons do some sort of work in order to avoid
boredom and sickness. Men do not breakdown from overwork but from worry and
dissipation. Work always generates optimism. All growth depends upon activity.
It is work that leads to self discovery and self-confidence.
In fact life
is action and not contemplation Man‘s worth is only determined by his actions.
Not only to know, but to act according to knowledge, is the destination of man.
Mere brooding will not do; all ambitions are empty unless materialized. For
example, Churchill was a man of action and he is immortal because of his
actions. One should look before one leaps; but leaping is more important than
looking. Life consists in leaping, rather than in looking. One should be a
heroin the strife. One should work and work and work and in work forget worries
and cares of his mortal existence. Work has an ennobling effect on man. A
worker never fears any body.
One should
work for the love of work and not for money only. Work man must. It will be
better if he works gratefully and not grudgingly. He should work as a man and
not as a machine. He should put his heart and soul into his work. In short, he
should enliven it. Work done in the right spirit leads to happiness. Says
Bertrand Russell, “consistent purpose is an almost indispensible condition of a
happy life. And consistent purpose
embodies itself mainly in work.”
Those
journalists who write as they feel derive more pleasure from their work than
those who are forced to write insincerely and for those ideas which they don’t
subscribe, for a few dollars.
According to
Russell, one of the foremost thinkers of our time, two chief elements make work
more interesting: first the exercise of skill and second construction. “Every
man who has acquired some unusual skill enjoys it until it has become a matter
of course”. A newly enrolled actor for three or four years takes a lyrical
pleasure in doing his role. And then constructive work provides us with more
joy than a destructive. In constructive work ‘’something is built up which
remains as a monument when the work is completed”. Happy is the man who like
Linen produces order out of chaos or who like Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan goes from
door to door bearing the torch of peace and non-violence before a war torn and
disillusioned world. In destruction there may be joy, but that emerges from
hate and is short-lived, and less satisfying though fiercer. Great artists and
scientists do work which is in itself delightful.
So Carlyle
is perfectly in the right when he says in ‘Past and Present’, “Blessed is he who
has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness”. But mind, an excess of
work is always very painful. It should alternate with play, Longfellow, in the
following lines, idealizes the working habit of The Village Blacksmith:
Each morning sees some task begun,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
According to
the Holy Quran”If any would not work, neither should he eat”.
Surely work
is divine In the words of Rabindranath
Tagore, God is there where the tiller is tilling the hard soil and the
path-maker is breaking the stones”.
