The "Workaholics" at No. 63

A workaholic: colloquially, is a person who is addicted to work (in normal parlance, a person who works for more than his/her stipulated working hours regularly).

4 Lierseestenweg: My office address in Mechelen which is a city in the province of Antwerp in Belgium.

0D, 1C, 1E: Sections within the office building where you can find people working at all sorts of odd hours.

No. 63: To be revealed later.

Well there are some nights when you just can't sleep and then there are some nights when something you experienced during the day stirs your thoughts so much that you just can't put them to rest. My father once told me that "worrying about it never solved any problem." As matter of fact as it sounds, it is quite a feat if you can put it to actual practice.

That said let me come to the source of the turmoil that has resulted in this insomnia. It was about 8 in the evening and I had come to the pantry to get a fresh cup of tea when I found that one of the call center executives who works in a rather special unit called "Customer Retention" was also there. During the wait for the kettle to boil the water we struck up a conversation. Now for my friends who are not very familiar with the European work culture and Belgian in particular, it would be prudent that I mention here that the office and especially my floor is almost completely empty by 6 in the evening and 8 is a "late hour". She mentioned that she has usually seen me still working almost every day when she is leaving after having finished her shift. I explained to her that I just stay back late finishing up pending tasks of the day.

That must have been quite strange for her as she asked how is it possible that there are pending tasks after working for 8 hours. It was quite difficult to explain all the reasons to her and there wasn't enough time either, but just as we were leaving the pantry to go back to our desk, she commented, "All of you are workaholics".

By 'all of you' she meant all people here from Infosys, as we are always the ones left behind after everybody else has gone and her impression of us being addicted to work isn't quite incorrect either. That ended just there and after duly finishing up my tasks I also headed back home.

Its usually my routine to take the long way back home from office as it gives me some peaceful extra time on my bicycle. It was around 10 and the streets were silent. I was riding my bike engrossed in some thoughts, when suddenly I was struck with some musical notes emanating from an unknown source. I slowed down to look or rather "hear" for the source. There weren't any pedestrians around neither were any cars so it couldn't have been some music system. It wasn't anyways the normal electronic beats you hear from the passing cars. As I heard more carefully I found that it was a piano playing with people singing in a choir. That's when it hit me that I was close to the church and it must be the choir group practicing. I slowed down a bit more and on the pretext of checking some stuff in the window next to house number 63 where they were reciting, I stole some more musical moments to savour.

10 PM in the night is quite late by all Belgian standards. Having taken time out from their jobs these people were practicing till so late. The reason as I would imagine must have been that in their pursuit to achieve that perfect harmony they lost the sense of time. None of them remembered how late it had gotten. "Workaholics!!" I thought.

This is the thought that has been stirring me tonight. How can I draw parallels to what some one does for charity and something which is officially one's job!! Not to say that I don't enjoy my work, but I still don't get called a workaholic just for doing something that engrosses me so much that I loose sense of time. When I think a bit more carefully I find that at the root of it is my worries! Yes. My worries about achieving too much too soon. I want to have everything twice as quickly by doing twice the amount of hard-work in half the time it actually requires. I remember now another little story. 

There was this ancient martial ats expert who was approached by a young man. The man asked the master, "How much time it will take me to be an expert in the martial arts?" The master replied "10 years". 

The man said, "But if I practice extra hard everyday putting in double the effort, how much time will it take me then?". The master replied calmly "20 years".

I never quite understood the significance of this story before today. In our relentless pursuits, we never relax and relish our achievements. We have to keep jumping from one feat to the next, discarding our own accomplishments for the sake of the next one in line. If we are just patient enough to let time take its course, everything else will follow suit.  Stop worrying and let time also play its part. I used to loathe the adage "Before time and more than your destiny, you will never get". But there is an aspect of it that you must not forget. Try as you might you can't beat the clock. No matter how many world records you break there is just no limit to where it ends. Even Usain Bolt will tell you that, but may be he's also just too young to understand that now.  If we try and rush to it, we will still only get their on time, and we will be twice as much tired.