When friends ask me how I am doing after a month in Istria, I answer that everything is fine and dandy, but that I am some way still from a day-to-day routine, habit, custom, or practice. For lack of a better word, I often refer to “work.” The work of writing and painting, walking and exercising, breathing and meditating. Here, writing is uppermost in my mind, as it will most likely take most of my time. I sometimes add that one month is not much and that I am not going to rush anything. Why rush, anyhow? But it has just crossed my mind that I may be barking up a wrong tree. Why work? Why not play? The play of writing and painting, walking and exercising, breathing and meditating? Or is “play” but a fancy word for “work”?

Addendum (September 9, 2003)

In The Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna about “pure work,” that is, “action without desire.”[1] Speaking of himself, Krishna says: “I have nothing to obtain, because I have all. And yet I work.”[2] Later on the Lord of the Soul explains: “In the bonds of work I am free, because in them I am free from desires.”[3] To wit, Krishna’s “pure work” is nothing but “play.”

Footnotes

1. Translated by Juan Mascaró, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1962, pp. 58-9, 62-3, 116-17.

2. Op. cit., p. 58.

3. Op. cit., p. 62.