Today I read a this post on FC Now by Evelyn Rodriguez titled:
What I Learned About Business at the Pike Place Market
It's a wonderful, rambling exploration of exactly the kind of discovery path that leads us to and from our "Aha!" moments. Rodriguez' involes a sandwich, a misread sign, and a book opened randomly, revealing that "the term samu is the Japanese word for working meditatively." (And as soon as I finish writing this post I'm going to google the hell out of that.)
I've written previously about how hard it is for professional thinkers to shake off the preconception that all "work" involves laboring for a fixed number of hours a day and having the "discipline" to conform to a routine. This post illustrates perfectly how the process of thinking really works, and by inference, how if we fail to allow enough "air" into our days for random chance, we will most certainly miss out on all of the myriad opportunities for inspiration, serendipity and synthesis that life affords. Discipline can be interpreted to mean mastery and achievement--it doesn't have to mean blindering and whipping ourselves on and on and on. The moral being: send a truly, deeply disciplined mind out for a sandwich, and you may get back a masterpiece.
NB: There's another message in Rodriguez's post, too, which is to remember not only the humanity and vitality of the worker, but also of the work itself. Whatever we do for a living, be we cannibals, cardinals or kings, it all comes down to creating and constructing the quality of the experience of eating a sandwich.
You could say that everything in life is somebody's business, in one way or another. Just as all business is somebody's life....
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