I’m increasingly persuaded that happiness is impossible if you do not enjoy work of all sorts–if you do not view work as enjoyable creation.
Personally, my work sometimes involves hard physical labor, with streams of sweat pouring out of me, dripping everywhere I go. I follow it with whiskey and very, very good sleep.
But–and I recall having mentioned this before–I get angry sometimes. Something is supposed to work, and it doesn’t. I was yelling and cussing in the middle of last night. The problems usually don’t even have the courtesy to be big things, but insist on being small and hidden, laughing like little gremlins or leprechauns at you.
This is in your head, of course. The question remains: what do you do when your work seems to fight back? Do you get angry, or do you realize that a golden opportunity has been granted you, in the form of a gauntlet thrown down, challenging you to maintain your cool and solve the problem?
I calmed myself down, and went back to it. It seems to me most of life is like this, though. If you can learn to enjoy the process of altering mind and matter through concerted effort, then most of what you HAVE to do, you will WANT to do.
Famously (to me, at any rate, since this is one of the few things he said that made absolute sense to me, so I quote it a lot), Freud said that the keys to happiness were “love and work” (or maybe “Work and Love”; it certainly wasn’t “flippancy and cigars”). It seems to me you love the way you work. The two are related. Love is always at least half what you give. Giving is work. Therefore you relate to others the way you work.
How do you do this? Are you patient, observant, flexible and persistent? Do you try to force things? Do you go hard, then stop? Are you lazy and complacent?
I can’t resist adding as well, that needing someone is not at all the same as loving them. You need food and water. Only weak people look first to using other people to help them maintain their intrapersonal and social homeostasis. What is desired is the capacity to exist independently, first; only then can you see other people as they are, and do for them what needs doing, and not what is most emotionally convenient for you.