Do we need to step off and slow down?

Excerpt

I grew up during my residency days constantly being reminded of the sanctity of hard work and diligence required to make a cardiac surgeon. Often we were admonished by our teachers with adages like ‘we worked endless hours’, ‘slept on the floor of the intensive care unit (ICU)’ and ‘did 48–72 h duty continuously’. Do we really need to work to death to make a cardiac surgeon? In fact, Japanese call this death due to overwork ‘Karoshi’. No wonder then, there is a clamour across the world for a right mix of work and relaxation, and for exclusive moments just for self. Even the venerable Mohandas K. Gandhi once posited, ‘There is more to life than increasing its speed’. The sweetness of doing nothing is captured in Bengal in what they call ‘Lyadh’, it is ‘Dolce far niente’ for the Italians, ‘Lagom’ for Swedes, ‘Wu-wei’ for a Taoist, and ‘Hygge’ for the Danes and the Nordic communities. ‘If you want to be happy’, says the stoic ‘Laughing’ Greek philosopher, Democritus, ‘do little’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4, Chapter 24, Penguin Books, 2006:28). …