When you do many things with excitement, energy and enthusiasm, your time perception changes and you tend to loose track of how time passes by. During the past three months I have been in the state of flow. Just over 2 months since my last post, but it feels as if I had posted it recently. Even then, in spite of so many things happening over the last couple of months, I have very little to share on this blog. Primarily because I want this blog to remain my personal blog in which I would prefer not to have work-related things.

So have I been working all this while and have had no personal time? Well, it’s a little complicated.

In the context of this post, work is an activity involving mental or physical effort as a means of earning income. Whereas pastime is an activity done in one’s leisure time for pleasure. Now things are not as simple as experiences at work = work life (or professional life) and experiences unrelated to work = personal life (alright, now don’t interpret personal life as private life). Instead, according to me, it depending on how willingly you do things. The underlying reason for personal life being separate from work life is because the former constitutes of things that you want to do (or prefer doing) over the things that constitute the latter. When you have the option to choose your work you may pick up any random activity that can generate an income. But if you (like me) want to do your best, you will pick up an activity that you love AND that can generate an income. Now here is an irony. If you really love your work why would you not be doing it in your personal time as well? I have no answer to that. So, I have come up with a statement that has applied to me over the past couple of months and I feel it will be applicable to most other cases:

When you decide to quit your job and work on your own, you are essentially trying to bring your work closer to your personal life. Or in other words you are unconsciously making an effort to overlap your personal life and work life.

Coming back the the question, have I been working all this while? It would not be incorrect to say that work nearly consumed the last three months of my life (except for a few days that I could probably count on my fingers). While an observer may say “You’re working all the time. It’s so bad.”, but it hasn’t been that bad. In fact it has been pretty good. Of course there are things that are “purely work” and have no overlap with your hobbies or pastime (e.g. getting over the government processes, running around to get your work done, dealing with legal shit etc.) but then you can’t get away without them as they are the enablers to your work.

So if there is an overlap between my work and personal life, why not put some of those things here? Because now that I have unconsciously overlapped my personal and work life, I want to consciously ensure that my personal life does not become a subset of of work life. This overlap is kind of a bubble. Rosy as long as the overlap does not overpower the personal life. But the moment it does, the bubble will burst, and I would be in a state similar to mad-scientists - the likes we see and say “They’ve got no life”.

As long as I use my personal blog to share experiences unrelated to work, I should be able to keep a check on that. And with this for the first time since I started blogging I do a small modification to my blog description that earlier read My life in my words.

Also sharing a video titled “The Secret Powers of Time” that I saw recently and it somewhat relates to this blogpost.

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