Many of us spend most of our time at work. If we do not
enjoy our work, if we feel overwhelmed by it, it will surely damage us. The
constant pressure of negative emotions causes inescapable damage to our
arteries and other delicate tissues. It also slows down the body’s capacity to
repair this damage.
To work at something you love, to be ‘self-actualized’ in
Maslow’s terms, is to protect yourself against dying young. As Khalil Gibran
wrote, ‘What is it to work with love?... It is to weave the cloth from the
strings of your heart, as though your beloved were to wear it.’
Politics can make the blood boil with suppressed rage and
unexpressed anxiety. ‘Fast tracking,’ being a corporate star, will extract the
inevitable price of damage to arteries if you are not ‘mindful’, if you are not
aware of the impact of everything you do on your system.
Reisman speaks of the ‘lonely crowd’. Loneliness, a sense
of exclusion, is a poison that can cause illness as easily as a virus or
bacteria. Loneliness is the most lethal of modern diseases. For example, newly
widowed women have a higher rate of breast cancer than wives or single women.
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