Glorified Maintenance Engineer
ServiceSpace
--Somik Raha
1 minute read
Dec 20, 2017

 

My friend Raghu Arur recently shared a gem about Swami Prabuddhananda, the head monk of the Vedanta Society in San Francisco who passed away in 2014. I have interacted with Swami P and was always struck by his powerful presence and wisdom. This story was shared directly by Swami P's acolyte with Raghu. This young monk-in-training found himself with a huge work burden and finally reached a point where he expressed his frustration to Swami P.

"I came here to be a monk, but instead, I find myself being a glorified maintenance engineer."

Swami P responded simply to him, "Aren't we all glorified maintenance engineers?"

The profundity of that comment struck me. It feels spot on -- for any field of work that we may pick, legal, software, non-profit, etc., the moment we start caring, we become glorified maintenance engineers!

The acolyte found that response truly freeing and he stopped fighting with the nature of things.

 

Posted by Somik Raha on Dec 20, 2017


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