Brain Food #563
There is only life
Thoughts of the day
Alain de Botton, contemporary philosopher and pessimist (though his words always carry a glimmer of hope with them), likes to tackle the big questions in life. Schools might teach us how to prepare for entering the working life, but not necessarily how to navigate it. On the elusive concept of work-life balance, de Botton suggests that, in fact, this is all but a myth.
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
The question we should be asking ourselves, then, is, what is truly worth fighting for. There is no work or life in isolation; there is only life, and what we make of it.
Wildlife photographers are a strange example of how work and life are fused into one. Their balance is close to non-existent. Nature is largely unpredictable, and so is the behaviour of animals. Waiting for a specific species to turn up can take hours of hiding and days, even months, of excruciating travel (as delicious as the idea may sound right now).
If it is worth fighting for, then it might be worth the wait, too.
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