Weekday Blues, Weekend Highs

Questioner: Work needs to be completed, but the habit of seeking pleasure leads to its neglect. This creates a dilemma. How can one overcome it?

Acharya Prashant: Why are these two different? There is work and then there is something else, why is there a separation?

Questioner: Because it has been conditioned that work is negative and not pleasurable.

Acharya Prashant: And that’s what makes the other thing pleasurable.

Acharya Prashant: Yes.

Acharya Prashant: But is that a fact ?

Questioner: No.

Acharya Prashant: Then why must you repeat that conditioning? Why must you maintain that separation? As long as you keep saying this is work and that is pleasure, work—by definition—becomes a burden.

Questioner: So that is basically the word of the conditioning, because the conditioning is deep.

Acharya Prashant: No, you are not warding it off—you are deepening it. When you tell a child, “If you finish your homework, you can go play,” do you know what you are telling him?

Questioner: That homework is a barrier between him and play. Or that work is not play.

Acharya Prashant: And you're condemning him to a work-life where he constantly longs for the end of office hours—because that’s when pleasure starts. This distinction must be obliterated .

Not only must work be play, but play must also be work.

When you're working, you should be playful—and when you’ve gone out to play, even in that moment, you must be working.

This, I know, is very much against conventional wisdom which wants to maintain a watertight separation between personal and professional life. And which always gives you the instinct that when you return home you must keep all the work behind you. It doesn’t happen that way and if it happens that way it will lead to suffering, stress and a fragmented mind.

When you are relaxing, work must be on. And when you are working, you must be relaxed.

How can work stop if work is truly an expression of what you are? How can you stop working, even for a few definite hours in the day?

Work has to be like breathing. You breathe continuously—you work 24 hours. And then, work becomes synonymous with play, because you cannot be toiling for 24 hours; you're playing 24 hours.

Questioner: How to come close to the facts?

Acharya Prashant: The facts are already there. Why do you have imaginations about anything? You're talking about your work—do you even know what your work is? Do you know the actual facts of your work?

You’ve imagined it to be work, and that’s why you deal with it as if it is work. You carry a conceptual baggage about what you're doing, and that's what you think you're doing. But do you really know your work?

You've built a portrait of your work, but what is your work? You just have an idea of it—but do you really know it?

When you know what you are doing, an indicator is that you're able to play with it.

Playfulness starts happening. The separation between you and what you’re doing reduces so much that you begin to feel empowered and free—authorised to play with it.

But when you have an image of something, then you're obliged to abide by the rules: “This is what I am doing. This is how it is done. It’s a four-step process—1, 2, 3, 4, stop.” And then it becomes boring—totally boring—because you do not know it. You only have an idea of it, and so you're forced to follow the rules.

You know, when one is not an engineer, when one knows nothing about how cars are designed, then you can only do as much as the instruction manual permits. The manual says: do this, do that, when the speed reaches X, change the gear, fill the tank, get the car serviced at such intervals —and you have to simply abide by those rules.

You don’t really know what you are doing. So, there’s no energy in it. No spontaneity. No playfulness.

It’s a list of instructions, and all you’re doing is following them. Who wants to live that way? And on top of that, you’re imagining that your pleasure lies elsewhere. First of all, this is so boring—and secondly, there’s pleasure waiting somewhere else. Now, imagine the quality of your work in such a mindset.

All this waiting for weekends, all this hankering after holidays—what is it? The festival season is upon us now, and if you go to any hill station during these days, there’s not even space to plant a foot. Hotels are charging exorbitantly. What is all this?

When you have no real relationship with your work—which is you—and hence, no relationship with yourself, then all your life becomes a pursuit of holidays. Even the concept of moksha or liberation becomes nothing more than a fantasy of one grand final holiday—one ultimate weekend that never ends, complete with all the nubile apsaras . That’s what moksha becomes: a never-ending weekend.

Questioner: And everybody is seeking moksha , calling it Monday blues.

Acharya Prashant: Yes, everybody is seeking moksha . There’s a Moksha Bar, a Nirvana Discotheque. There’s even a new kind of weed that has come up—samadhi .

(Laughter)

Questioner: Is the problem of not being able to relate to work externally rooted internally in the person? And why is it that while many kids resist doing homework, most of them don’t resist going out to play in the garden? Clearly, there seems to be a difference between play—using your body outdoors—and doing homework.

Acharya Prashant: They want to go out to the garden because there’s no opportunity to play inside the house. Otherwise, they would love playing indoors too. Kids are desperate to go out only because they’re not allowed to play inside. Playing is natural; it expresses itself everywhere. But when they try to play inside, they get scolded. Otherwise, they’d be just as happy playing indoors. There’s no real distinction—none at all.

You’ve created that wall: outside is the playground; inside is the living room—no playing allowed. This is the same kind of distinction we create between a Friday and a Saturday, or a Sunday and a Monday. Inside is Friday; outside is Saturday.

Questioner: Sir, is it really not about the book? What I’m trying to arrive at is—there seems to be a distinction between a book and a ball, where one can be naturally playful with a ball, but a book hardly allows any scope for playfulness.

Acharya Prashant: One who is not playful with the book cannot be playful with the ball. Please understand this. It’s not that the book is unappealing to you—the fact is, your own life is not appealing to you. When you’re with the book, you’re pretending boredom; when you’re outside, you’re pretending entertainment. The facts are nowhere—there’s only pretension.

When you really know the small facts of your life:

When you know all this, then you also know work, you know play—and you know that there is no distinction.

What do you think? That the man who is bored during weekdays suddenly becomes lively on the weekend? Seriously? You think the man who is dead and flaccid till 7 p.m. becomes a pulsating, lively, creative mass of energy at 10 p.m.? If he’s flaccid in the office, he’ll be flaccid in bed too. If he requires a stimulant in the office, he’ll require a stimulant in bed as well.

The one who plays, plays with everything. The one who works, works with everything. And these two are one.

Even while playing, he is working—working in the sense that normal, natural, spontaneous activity is going on. And even while working, he is playing. There’s hardly a difference. You ask him his working hours—you’ll be puzzled, as I often am when someone asks me, “How long do you work?” Because I never know when it starts and when it ends.

If someone tells you that he works from ‘x’ to ‘y’ hours, then that fellow is a cheat. And if someone says he parties from ‘x’ to ‘y’ hours, then that fellow is a bore. His party ends—he’s such a bore. At ‘y’ hours, his party ends. And his work ends too—he’s such a cheat. He is not doing justice to his work.

How can work end?

All of this won’t fit into the theories your universities are teaching you—don’t try. There’s going to be no synthesis.

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