work

This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He wants to make friends with people.

Siddhartha never had an ear for Kamaswami's worries, and Kamaswami had a lot of worries. If a transaction was threatened by failure, if a shipment of wares seemed lost, if a debtor appeared unable to pay, Kamaswami could never convince his colleague that it was useful to waste words of grief or anger, to have furrows on his forehead, to sleep badly.

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it's also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives."

I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things.

Doc and Llama are on their second thru-hike of the AT. They did the PCT the same year as Ken and Marcia. They are in the small sect of thru-hikers that could be dubbed "career hikers." During the off-season, Doc does landscape work and Llama waits tables. These aren't jobs with "a future" they're jobs that will fund their next adventure. People living normal lives are ruffled by folks like Doc and Llama. Nonconformity is an affront to those in the mainstream. Our impulse is to dismiss this lifestyle, create reasons why it can't work, why it doesn't even warrant consideration. Why not? Living outdoors is cheap and can be afforded by a half year of marginal employment. They can't buy things that most of us have, but what they lose in possessions, they gain in freedom.

Since leaving my job for the trail, I have received overwhelming support from former coworkers and from friends who hold similar jobs. They are intrigued by the adventure, but what they can most relate to is the desire to abandon the cubicle, to walk away from unfulfilling employment. In some ways I feel like a surrogate for their unrealized desire to escape, an escapee cheered on by the prisoners.

"It's a selective retirement," Richard explained, "a retirement from boring shit." "I think that's called a promotion."

"I've always wanted to sail to the south seas, but I can't afford it." What these men can't afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of 'security'. And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine - and before we know it our lives are gone".

If there was a hell, it was in sales.