Long ago I read an excerpt from Mark Twain's book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was titled 'Whitewashing the Fence'. From what I remember of this narrative, the protagonist, Tom Sawyer is given the task of whitewashing his fence. To make matters worse, as Tom sits down to do the needful, his friends come traipsing along, having all sorts of fun.
What follows in the story is an amazing dispay of Tom's socio-emotional dexterity. He convinces his friends that whitewashing the fence is 'play'. Even more play than what they were doing. They are manipulated by him, without their knowledge, into whitewashing the fence and thinking that it's 'play'.
The lesson the reader is to take home from this episode is the looseness of the definition of 'Work' and 'Play'. There's a really thin line that divides the two. One that exists only in the minds of people. When we talk about loving what we do, we probably mean that when you fudge that line dividing work and play you invariably do better.
Work is by compulsion. Play is by volition. When we decide to do something because we genuinely get the inner urge to do it, we tend to do it better. But work is after all what we consider mundane and tiring.
So how do you mix work and play? How do you take something boring and make it deliciously interesting and fun? I guess it can only be achieved by taking control of that elusive, ever-distracted entity called the mind.
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