'Work is what you're doing when you'd rather be doing something else.' — Ian Stevenson

Stevenson was a psychiatrist, the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where he served as a professor of psychiatry for fifty years.

When I read the sentence in the headline up top in an interview with him sometime last century, time stopped for me.

His definition trumps all others ever.

Ever since I saw it I've used it often to help me clarify if what I'm doing is what I want to be doing at that moment.

You can too!

But I digress.

A wonderful corollary to Stevenson's observation is from one Kinky Friedman: it appeared in an interview with him that appeared in the now defunct Style section of the Washington Post in the early 1980s.

Friedman remarked, "I'm in search of a lifestyle that does not require my presence."

Bingo.

These two brief yet transcendental epigrams have guided me well.

Lagniappe: read Herman Melville's sublime 1856 story "Bartleby, The Scrivener" here.

Free, the way we like it.