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.