It was one of those days when the discussion over coffee with friends was about “Work, quality of work life, the so-called work-life balance concept” and how our lives had been divided into weekdays and weekends. Come Friday, and there is a sense of optimism, freedom, celebration and come Sunday evening one can sense the effects of Monday blues making the Sunday evening heavy and gloomy. It made me contemplate even more how a man-made concept of weekdays and weekend determined how we experienced our life.
For most part of my erstwhile career as a Tax professional – life pretty much oscillated between weekdays and weekends. Weekdays went by trying to manage legal or other client specific deadlines one after the other and weekends with a sigh of relief (even if it meant working most part of the Saturday to take the pressure off the deadlines for the week ahead). Much that I did enjoy my work, enjoyed the adrenaline rush trying to juggle multiple client deliverables, the legal- technical discussion forcing oneself to think out of the box, yet there were days when the dark cloud of Monday blues would overcast my monkey mind – for something did feel very mundane, limited, pointless with an overall sense of some form of self-imposed slavery, lack of freedom with a prevailing sense of doom – of having wasted my life. To put it succinctly , I simply wasn’t contented or happy.
As we steered our discussion into “Why we do what we do”, the revelation was simple – “to be Happy”. In nutshell, whatever we do in life, is with the ultimate objective to be Happy. If finding everlasting happiness is the purpose of life, is what drives our soul, then to me it is simple that happiness cannot be experienced without having a complete engagement with life. So, what does it mean to be engaged with life?
In the big corporate world, a lot of attention is now being paid to Employee Engagement and there are surveys conducted to understand that. Based on the scores, actions are taken to either have better scores or better engagement or continue doing whatever is being done to maintain status quo. Employee engagement is a concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of relationship between an organization and its employees. Based on the survey, employees are classified as “Actively engaged “, “actively disengaged” or “not engaged“.
An “actively engaged employee” is defined as one who is fully absorbed and enthusiastic about their work. Someone who takes positive action to further the organization’s reputation and interests. Actively engaged employees have a positive attitude towards the organization and its values. That’s because the organization’s values and the employees’ values are mostly aligned. They work with full passion and are emotionally attached to the organization. They are innovative and provide ideas and perform consistently to move the organization forward, in a way that they personalize the company goals and objectives and always work above and beyond their job requirements for the betterment of the organization.
An “actively disengaged employee” on the other hand ranges between someone doing the bare minimum work up to an employee who is actively damaging the company’s work output and reputation. They are unhappy, resentful, always complaining and spread negativity within the organization.
A “not-engaged employee” is someone who does put in their time, but not their passion or energy into their work, they are not fully invested. They only do what is asked of them. They do not hold either a negative or a positive attitude towards the organization. They consider their job a paycheck and nothing more.
The three categories remind me of the three “Gunas” or qualities / attributes / tendencies, the interplay of which defines the nature, character of someone which effectively determines their quality of life – a concept which is found in the ancient Vedic texts of Hindu philosophy. The three Gunas are – Sattva (goodness, calmness, harmonious, positive, self-evolving), Rajas (passion, activity, movement, fast thinking) and Tamas (ignorance, negativity, inertia, laziness, dullness). It is said, that all the three Gunas co-exist in every human being but the dominant one determines the quality of one’s existence in this world or the experiences we create for ourselves. Effectively, all the three Gunas are necessary for survival and in our progressive movement in life.
The three Gunas pretty much are also present in the food we consume, the things, the kind of work we do, the relationships/ interactions or activities where we invest our time. The way we perceive our lives to be or where we are in terms of our level of happiness is also directly in relation to the predominant Guna in us.
The question we need to ask ourselves is how engaged are we with our own life. Are we actively engaged with our life i.e., are we fully present or engaged in what we do? Or are we mostly someone who ends up finding a problem in everything, or generally pessimistic, focusing on what’s missing, spending most our time complaining and moaning? Or are we someone who prefers being aimless, low or no sense of passion for whatever life offers, and just going with the flow trying to avoid facing changes?
Drawing similarity I believe, we can call someone actively engaged in life as a person who has a sense of passion for life itself, considers every day as a day full of opportunity to grow more, evolve more as a human being. Actively engaged people are excited about life, feel a sense of gratitude when they wake up in the morning, they wake up with a smile on their face, love the experiences that they co-create, invest themselves in wisdom, are able to convert adversities into opportunities, have a general sense of excitement even if it involves doing mundane, routine things, they flow along the river of life with a sense of zeal, are high on their vibration and are able to maintain that overall positive energy throughout the day. They spread joy and happiness around and are generally compassionate towards everyone ( fellow human being, animals, environment). They are people who enjoy every aspect of their life which includes work, leisure, have a balanced approach and are amiable and open to embracing changes. Although its difficult to marry the ancient Vedic concept of “Guna’s” and the more modern concept of “Engagement”, I am more inclined to think that actively engaged person would predominantly have Sattvic qualities (goodness, calmness, harmonious, positive, self-evolving) with action being driven from the Rajasic approach for they would have the ability to drop their attachment to the outcomes.
In my view active engagement in life fundamentally means having the ability/ sense for total acceptance for whatever unfolds, for whatever we create, we know that we are doing as Masters of our lives. Having a sense of equanimity, detachment to the never-ending pattern of changes. Someone who can live life with palms open face up – as the Masters say, who doesn’t grasp but feels gratitude for everything (good or bad) that shows up and bows and blesses everything that goes. Someone who knows that we are all playing the game called LIFE knowing very well that it’s all very temporary, just like how excited we are to play all other games, knowing very well that it will come to an end at some point, yet we put our heart and soul into it. When we are actively engaged with life, we can spread love and experience the Godliness within us.
However, if you are someone who regularly has Monday blues, or waits for the week to finish so that you could be happy during the weekend, if you are generally struggling to wake up in the morning, if you are someone who is taking life for granted and has a very short list when it comes to counting your blessings, if your general view is that all of life is a struggle, then you are not actively engaged with life. Rather you are someone who is actively disengaged with life. Actively disengaged people are people who go through the motions of life because time has to be spent. They keep themselves busy because they are afraid to spent time alone, or they get bored very easily. They are usually unhappy resentful people who are always complaining, judging and attribute everything and everyone external for their cause of unhappiness. They have the victim mindset. I am inclined to think that people who have a disengaged involvement with life, would predominantly have Tamasic tendencies.
The Not-engaged people are the people who are busy ticking the boxes because that’s what they are conditioned to do. They usually have a closed mind and a have strong sense of what is right or wrong. Not-engaged people usually have a long to do list and they are busy ticking that off and define their accomplishment based on the boxes ticked. If you are just going through the motions of life, ticking off the boxes on the to-do list, doing things because that’s the right thing to do, then you are someone who is not engaged with life. Since action is the area of focus, I am inclined to think that the predominant tendencies / Guna here is Rajasic.
From an energy perspective, we tend to fluctuate between the three levels of engagement depending on the task at hand. And that level of engagement eventually determines whether we are happy or sad, excited, or not. Basically, our happiness quotient is then directly linked to our engagement with life itself. It is not dependent on anything external but largely on our energy, on our vibration – high or Low, or in terms of tendencies/ Gunas whether we are predominantly Sattvic, Rajasic or Tamasic.
I leave you with this pertinent question of where are you in terms of your engagement with Life and the overall happiness quotient, ending with a passage from the Book “Happiness is your Creation” by Swami Rama.
” A happy mind is the source of all healing powers. A person with a happy mind is full of enthusiasm, courage, and self-motivation. A person with a happy mind is free from all complaints. Cultivating a joyful mind is the greatest of all spiritual practices. All human beings, regardless of whether they come from the East or the West, are equally in need of happiness. According to the yogis, happiness is always preceded by peace. A quiet mind is the foundation for cultivating a joyful mind. Mental quietude depends on one of the greatest virtues : inner purity. Without inner purity, we suffer from inner poverty.”