Log 4-11-15 Muriate of Potash

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‘If you work without love. Then you are no better than a slave. Let us not talk about passion in the context of work. Let us not ever do that. As that word is so frequently used by BS politicians and phoney leaders it’s hollowed out of all meaning. To me the word passion is just a bullshit word like right sizing.

Love is sufficient to convey what I mean. Love is all we need to explain the precise attitude that you should preferably have when you speak about your work…otherwise you are just like monkey trained to pick coconuts.

When you’re in love everything suddenly becomes fascinating….exciting and mesmerizing. It’s one of those few words that can step right out of the corseted terms of it’s dictionary meaning to embrace so many hemispheres of emotions that takes you to a heightened state.

With only the power of love suddenly what is before you becomes a thinking thing – it’s like the way a woman looks at a man who she loves. I am not talking about plastic love. I am referring to the ambrosia of love…total and complete love….the real Mc Coy. The one thing that can set your heart aflame and send your senses reeling as if you’re spinning in a blender. This woman who is raptured by her lover….only she can see and feel things that no other women can ever see in that man…it doesn’t have to be spectacular…it doesn’t even have to extraordinary…it could just something really mundane like the sound of his voice that she considers sonically beautiful…melodious…nuanced and layered with all that she just loves about him. Or the way he carries himself.

Love is the one thing that empowers one with an uncanny insight to see beyond flesh, bone and into the mind, that is why it is so powerful – nothing if ever noticed has changed. The world is the same as it was yesterday. Yet with love everything is transformed and suddenly nothing is ever the same again. Don’t you think that’s remarkable.

It’s like the feeling you get when you believe deep down the whole world just went thru a hump like a car momentarily floating in air when all it’s four tires are suspended in air….only you can feel this sensation…..only you know it has happened….only you can sense this microscopic and infinitesemial transformation.

Consider this. A man who chisels letters all day on stone, without love. What is he? He’s really just a technician. But once you present this man with the question – do you love your work? Suddenly his work is transformed into a thinking thing. He puts his tool to stone, strikes it with a mallet and nine out of ten it comes off wrong. You may well say, you disabled this man by clouding his judgement and sullying his skill as a stone carver.

But I say, all you have done is to provoke something very deep within him. As till then his work was just a dead thing and now it’s infused with life…it’s pulsing…growing and soon it tears out from deep within this man….that is why this man is confused. As till then his work was just a series of meaningless repetitions in perhaps the same way a man flips roti prata all day to produce X or Y number depending on the number of customers he has to serve….but once your work is transformed into a thinking thing – then love flows into that process called work and with it depth and a deep curiosity to explore further opens up an entire field of possibilities which never once existed and suddenly work becomes much more than just work….do you see what I mean?

Or maybe you don’t….yes maybe that is why you are just a slave….that was what I once told a man who drove a taxi. He used to be a banker. But he was retrenched and he was bitter about it. So one day I asked him – tell me do you love your job?. He was of course quite irritated by my line of questioning which he considered mildly condescending. But that day I was not in the mood for flippant answers, nor did I have patience to bear out his constant Lamentations as how life conspired against him blah blah blah – to cut a long story short.

I held this man down with a knife pressed against his throat. I took out his identity card and looked at it and told him in a rather matter a fact sardonic tone – I know where you live now….I want you to go to Africa to discover love. I don’t want you to drive a taxi any longer…there is no love behind the wheel…besides it’s bad for your back…you see I want you to be transformed by love. As what you are presently to me is an effrontery and it pains me to see you living the rest of your days bitter and angry, but worst of all I can’t bear the thought of a man impersonating a monkey trained to pick coconuts. So I rather kill you now and bury you somewhere in Bukit Timah.

I went on to recount to this man, If he didn’t make something out of his life in a two year period. I will take his pretty wife away from him. I will even make sure she kicks him out of the house….I will fuck her, split her in two like firewood and post it in Youtube for the whole wide world to see what a miserable poor excuse of a half man he really is.

This man just stayed there….he didn’t fight back. Then asked me, why are you picking on me….and I said to him….because you are not in love with your life and I so want you to experience what it means to be in it’s sweet embrace of this life changing force. I want you to feel love in the way Star Wars cognoscenti’s declare proudly – may the force be with you! As that is what you really need and since you will never ever find it behind the wheel of a taxi…it’s hardly a matter of choice for me…..I have to kill you!

Believe or not he was so scared and traumatized. He left for Africa within the week – poof he was gone – he mined gold. It was difficult for him at first. But that’s how it is when you fall in love in the very beginning with a thing that you hardly care to understand…it takes time…time for love to take root and curl around you like a vine…time for it to whirl it’s way into your heart filling every cavity of your being. But I put it all together – in the brotherhood we can do this as we have an extensive network of frontier men in Africa. It’s wasn’t difficult and soon the man was raptured by love….he was reincarnated as a gold miner. The sort that knows his craft so well that he can even roll a clump of dirt between his index finger and thumb, bring to his nostrils and he just knows….that to me is what love can infuse to the whole idea of work.

And one day when he had finally discovered his el Derado. I asked of this man again…tell me are you in love with what you do.

The man said, yes….it wasn’t yes like you would say it as if you’re just reading it from a laminated card. Or yes like I asked you whether I could borrow ten dollars. It was one of those epic yeses. You know the sort where everything is so very still and it leaves absolutely no room for doubt that this man is completely in love – as he went on to recount, it was the best thing that ever happened to him when he chanced on me along with maybe the idea of…jumping off the ledge only to discover he had wings to fly and to be caught by love in mid air. I saw it all as he spoke it in his the depths of his eyes.

Do you see how it is when you love your work?…suddenly you find that you can do things that you never ever thought you could ever do.

Many people censured me for what I did – they called me nasty names like Walter Kurtz. They said my methods were unsound. That I had unhinged. Lost my marbles . That is understandable. As my detractors don’t ever know what it means to fall love with what you do….if they did then I am sure they would have thanked me with bended knees in the way this man did – that is why they will never ever understand either my philosophy or methods….just as they will probably never understand how it is to fall totally and completely in love with your work.’