The inspiration for this post came from an unlikely source.
I have been reading Haruki Murakami’s acclaimed novel Norwegian Wood. If you haven’t read it already, I recommend you do. It’s a riveting book that had me hooked from the first page.
As I was making my way through the book, there was a particular passage that stood out to me.
Reading that passage I felt my head nodding almost instinctively as my eyes met the words.
It was like Murakami had bored into my mind and placed my thoughts into his novel. I felt a deep resonation with the passage and pondered it long after I had stopped reading.
The passage detailed a conversation between the protagonist Watanabe and his friend Nagasawa, where they discuss how hard people work.
Nagasawa is scathing of his fellow students at the university where he and Watanabe study. He states they do not work anywhere near as hard as he does. The work they do is without direction and purpose.
This passage touched on something I had been contemplating for a while and brought it to the forefront of my mind.
We all work, but how much of it is meaningful. How much of it has direction and purpose? Nagasawa went on to say, people simply working hard without direction is manual…
