Last week I went to see a professor who happened to be my father’s friend. An unlikely friend considering that my late father was a farmer. To cut the long story short, they became friends through my second cousin who worked with the professor before he was a professor.
Without digressing any further, let’s jump to the main story.
Since the professor was in KK for his work appointment, we set a time to meet up. He had genuinely shown his interest in the progress of my work since I started my PhD. And as a lecturer, one of the ‘must’ thing that we need to do is to write articles, well, we are supposed to generate knowledge besides the teaching. This one, not many people understand it, even the so called lecturer themselves. Anyway, as expected, the article writing and scientific publications became the main topic of our conversation.
But somehow out of the blue, he deviated from the main topic and asked me a queer question, ‘Are you happy with your work?’
It did stop me for awhile, I mean, I did take a few second to think before shooting him back with the answer, the diplomatically one.
From there onwards, all the other matters that pop out from our discussion didn’t interest me as much since I kept asking myself, ‘Am I happy with my work?’
Surprisingly, I was very much happy with my work and the thought made me asking the simple question again and again, and even seeking the answer from the deep down of my heart.
It's the worry of loving the WORK so much that made me keep repeating the Q unnecessarily. As much as I want, I can’t even answer the ‘why’ question. Why I love my job?
If it is because of the pay, comparing to my colleague who came in as a ‘doctor’ with only their bachelor degree, they are making much more than me. The workload is heavy, though not so much on the lifting all the heavy things or making more coffees, heavy in the sense of doing the thinking part.
Finally, I guess the job come to me naturally because this work allows me to think more than doing. The doing maybe just in the reading and writing, which both fall into the hobby category of mine, besides cooking and fishing. Basically, the things that I do now (that I consider work) are things that I do when I don’t work.
Is this healthy, to love your daily job so much? I don’t know. I think I am supposed to keep the day job just to earn money for living, not to love it. Only artiste have the privilege to play around with their hobby to earn a living. Maybe I am wrong.
