He may be a little on the intellectual side, but oh how we love Milan Kundera around here. If you’ve never read any of his work, we highly recommend “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” This week’s quote of the week is a unique perspective taken by Kundera, one of our favorite authors ever!
“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.”
We certainly don’t mean to suggest (and we don’t think that Kundera did either) that we should all quit having goals and aspirations and simply lay around watching TV and eating bon bons all day! However, we think the point of the quote is that, sometimes, being lazy is a necessary part of life in order to really enjoy oneself and relax. Too often in today’s world, we’re so focused on the rat race, earning more and owning more that we never allow ourselves those moments when we simply sit and enjoy the feeling of doing nothing. Kundera, in the above quote, points out the problem here. We allow our ambition to take away from us a number of things that are truly satisfying, and one of those things is the right to sometimes, just for a while, be lazy.
Of course, our mission at Postconsumers is to help you find the satisfaction of enough, and we certainly think that allowing yourself to, in moments, be lazy is a cool part of that. It’s also about separating yourself out from the machine that makes you think that ambition has to exist separately from having a fulfilling life. Finding a balance between your ambition and experiencing life is what we at Postconsumers believe is one of the keys.
So, if you haven’t allowed yourself to be lazy recently, do so soon! If not tonight, then this weekend. But you deserve it. Take some lazy time!
