October/November/December, 2005 IN MY OPINION
"Workship " with "Grattitude "
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The rewards of hard work and thankfulness By nannapaneni narayana rao I
completed high school in India 58 years ago. Eighteen years after that, I
received my Ph.D. in the United States. For the 40 years that have transpired
since then, I have been working at the same job. Now, in my eighth decade of
life, people are beginning to ask me why I continue to work, why I don't just
retire and enjoy life. I always reply that I love my job and I enjoy my work.
Still, everyone is wondering what keeps me going.
Finally, I announced to the people that I work with--all 150 of them--the
secret of my inspiration: gratitude. In his divinely beautiful style, Gurudeva
Sivaya Subramuniyaswami (founding publisher of Hinduism Today) explains:
"Gratitude and appreciation are the key virtues for a better life. They are the
spell that is cast to dissolve hatred, hurt and sadness, the medicine which
heals subjective states of mind, restoring self-respect, confidence and
security."
I am grateful for many things. But most of all, I am grateful for the Hindu
heritage I received from my late pious parents. They lived in a village called
Kakumanu in Andhra Pradesh, India--halfway around the world from my Illinois
home. As I reflect upon my young life with them, I am convinced that it is
their influence that has fostered the development in me of what I now consider
to be the ultimate attitude for the enjoyment of work. To further express this
concept I have been inspired to coin two new words for this article: grattitude
and workship.
Grattitude means an attitude of gratitude. In the performance of my job, I
feel grattitude for the opportunity I have been given to help facilitate the
education of our wonderful youth, through my teaching, writing and
administration. I have learned that performing such work with grattitude yields
immediate enjoyment, while performing that same work expecting appreciation in
return yields the opposite effect.
Workship means approaching work as worship. This is nothing new. It's an old
Hindu concept which I am just now identifying with a catchy new word-name. In
his article, "Work Is Worship " (Hinduism Today, July/August/September 2004),
Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami lists four ways to cultivate what I would call
workship: "1) integrate spirituality into work; 2) seek ways to serve; 3)
dedicate your actions to God; 4) work on yourself." When I read this I realized
that I had been following these practices for a long time.
I approach my job every morning with the thought that I am going to the
"Temple of Electrical and Computer Engineering, " where I will workship. The
first thing I do when I enter my office is offer salutations to a statue of
Lord Ganesha, which I have installed in a small shrine there. Then I go to
workship with my staff, students and faculty colleagues, striving always to
carry out my tasks with a willpower born of the conviction that "for every
problem, there is not just a solution, but a good solution."
I have found that when one is able to practice workship with grattitude,
rewards come without being sought. Recently, a student walked into my office
unexpectedly. She was carrying a beautifully framed painting of Ganesha and a
greeting card, which read: "If we measure success by the number of lives we
touch and the ways that we reach out to others and truly make a difference,
then it's hard to imagine a richer life than yours."
Certainly, at that moment I was filled with immeasurable grattitude--not just
for such a wonderful gift and the beautiful thoughts behind it, but for
everything. I may now honestly say that I am truly grateful to all for all,
because I have learned, in my 70-plus years, that true enjoyment is the result
of workship with grattitude.
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Hinduism Today
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Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny.
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