At
the end of the day, if you can’t sleep well, you need to examine what’s it
that’s disturbing you. And you must weed that factor out of your Life.
This morning I met
someone who says he isn’t able to get a good night’s sleep. “I used to love my
work. I still believe I love it. But I don’t know why I am unable to enjoy what
I am doing, and of late, I am even unable to sleep well. The stress keeps me
awake,” he confessed. I told this gentleman that if he is unable to enjoy
whatever he is doing, and if it has reached a point where he is unable to sleep
well, he must seriously pause and reflect. I advised him to step out of his “work-work-work
zone”, take a vacation and think through his Life!
This is the nub:
nothing, nothing at all, is worth losing your sleep over. If you can’t take
your mind off work it means one of three things: 1. You don’t have enough reliable
support (staff, material, resources) to do what you are doing 2. The system (colleagues,
bosses, clients, work culture) at your workplace is highly disorganized and
stress-ridden. 3. You are a lousy leader and manager. There could be other
reasons. But these three are principal among them. If you don’t enjoy what you
are doing, then you must go do what you love doing. Simple. And if you enjoy
your work but if any of those reasons is/are prevalent in your work Life, you
must get down to fixing them. Simple again!
The idea of living
is not about obsessing over earning-a-living. It is not about slogging for 40
years and then hoping to find happiness, inner peace and freedom to do what you
want to do at the age of 60. You have been given this Life so that you can be
yourself, so that you can go do what you love doing. Now, when something
disturbs your equilibrium, you must zero in on what it is and weed it out.
Rather than suffer and endure a Life that you don’t want, you must make choices
that help you with your inner peace, and help you to find and follow your
bliss.
I simply loved
what Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian author who won the Nobel for
Literature yesterday, said: “I do only one thing. I buy freedom for myself.”
Indeed! What is the point of this Life if you cannot be
who you want, do what you want to do, live the Life that you believe in and, at
the end of the day, get a good night’s sleep?
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