Recently, I watched the Irish film “Golgotha”. A man resentful against the clergyman class decides to kill (and kills) a good and kind priest for paying attention to his problem. The perpetrator warns his victim and gives a week to arrange his affairs. But the priest, knowing his fate, is not “getting prepared for dying,” but is engaged with his daily affairs and exercises his spiritual mission.
The film has other different contextual layers, but this notion is very important to me, regardless of whether a week or a hundred years is left for you, focus on your work and do it in the best way. The majority of people with whom I contact are focused on other different issues. The options are mainly two. The first and commonly spread one is to compare your life, daily routine and property with similar opportunities of other people. To the point, they are compared not with those who are in bad and unfavorable situation, but vice versa, as an example, they take the life of those who are ten and hundred times richer and prosperous.
Any person can make such a comparison unfavorable for him. Not to offend anyone, I will bring my example. I work at least 15 hours a day, but I live worse than any police major does. Should I quit my work in order to think and grieve that this major uses more calorie food or sleeps in a softer bed than I do? If I spend at least 1 percent of my time and energy on such unproductive thoughts (“Oh, what an unjust world!”), I will oversight in my work, I will not be able to concentrate on my work. And if I start feeling sorry for myself for my “unfortunate fate”, then I will be lost at all as a man and as a specialist. Unfortunately, I often meet people who are engaged in “self-compassion.”
The second kind of deviating from your own mission is also very common, and to the point, often “attacks” the media editorials. This kind can be conventionally called “I know.” “I know how to make our country prosperous. I know how to save the nation, to return our historic lands, to kneel down the Turks” and so on. These people not only “know,” but also compose their “knowing” in “scientific” articles, in fiction and sometimes even in verse. What remains is to make these brilliant ideas public, and all the “nation” will run to implement them. People offering such “solutions” simply do not know their title, otherwise they would not have wasted time on “nation-saving” projects.
… It seems to me that we should not be “prepared” for anything. It is much more useful for the society just to live by doing your job. Live today.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
