Hard Work

I'm in the middle of watching Burnt starring Bradley Cooper, its on pause because I needed to write this down. There is a line in the movie where his character talked about working 20 hours a day in a busy French kitchen and I find myself admiring the sentiment of working hard. I thought of functioning on 4 hours of sleep every day and realize that I haven't had to work that hard in my life, ever. That made me feel unaccomplished, like somehow I have missed a rite of passage to adulthood or even scarier, to success.

Younger people nowadays have things at their fingertips and those are probably the most overworked part of their bodies. I'm no better, translation requires nimble fingers and mind alike. Sometimes I feel the need to do manual, menial, hard labour. A part of me suspects that humans are wired that way, to move of course, but also we have an innate desire to stretch our muscles taut, lift more than we think we can, do magic by growing plants and so on.

A friend asked me to visualize my future once. When I do this, oftentimes an image of a white house by the sea comes up but also, I find that I sometimes yearn for a farm house, with cows and goats and chickens, and green rolling hills stretching as far as the eyes can see.