How to work
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When you feel tired, don't overstrain yourself but rest - doing only
your ordinary work; restlessly doing something or other all the time
is not the way to cure it. To be quiet without and within is what is
needed when there is this sense of fatigue. There is always a
strength near you which you can call in and will remove these
things, but you must learn to be quiet in order to receive it. Sri
Aurobindo |
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Sri Aurobindo |
To be able to be regular is a great force, one becomes master of one's time and one's movements.
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A resolution means the will to try to get a thing done by the given time. It is not a binding "promise" that the thing will be done by that time. Even if it is not, the endeavour will have to continue, just as if no date had been fixed. Sri Aurobindo |
...if you want to do it well, you must become what you are doing and not remain a small person looking at himself doing it; for if one looks at oneself acting, one is... one is still in complicity with the ego. If, in oneself, one succeeds in becoming what one does, it is a great progress. In the least little details, one must learn this. Take a very amusing instance: you want to fill a bottle from another bottle; you concentrate (you may try it as a discipline, as a gymnastic); well, as long as you are the bottle to be filled, the bottle from which one pours, and the movement of pouring, as long as you are only this, all goes well. But if unfortunately you think at a given moment: "Ah! it is getting on well, I am managing well", the next minute it spills over! It is the same for everything, for everything. That is why work is a good means of discipline, for if you want to do the work properly, you must become the work instead of being someone who works, otherwise you will never do it well. If you remain "someone who works" and, besides, if your thoughts go vagabonding, then you may be sure that if you are handling fragile things they will break, if you are cooking, you will burn something, or if you are playing a game, you will miss all the balls! It is here, in this, that work is a great discipline. For if truly you want to do it well, this is the only way of doing it. The Mother |
Would it not be better to continue the work even if one feels lazy or ilI? That depends on the work; there we enter another domain. If it is a work that you are doing for the collectivity and not for yourself personally, then you must do it, whatever happens. It is an elementary discipline. You have undertaken to do this work or have been given the work and have taken it up, therefore you have accepted it, and in that case you must do it. At all times, unless you are absolutely ill, ill in the last degree and unable to move, you must do it. Even if you are rather ill, you must do it. An unselfish work always cures you of your petty personal maladies. Naturally, if you are really compelled to be in bed without being able to move, with a terrible fever or a very serious illness, then that's quite different. But otherwise, if you are just a little indisposed: "I am not feeling quite well, I have a little lead ache or I have indigestion, or I have a bad cold, I am coughing", things like that - then doing your work, not thinking of yourself, thinking of the work, doing it as well as you can, that puts you right immediately. In reality illness is only a disequilibrium; if then you are able to establish another equilibrium, this disequilibrium disappears. An ilIness is simply, always, in every case, even when the doctors lay that there are microbes - in every case, a disequilibrium in the being: a disequilibrium among the various functions, a disequilibrium among the forces. The Mother |