I don’t work. People ask me on Mondays, “How was your weekend?” I just shrug. I don’t distinguish between “weekend” and “week”. It’s all the same to me. I don’t have a day “off” because I don’t have a day “on.” That’s because I don’t work.

I hate work. As soon as it becomes work, I don’t do it. Some people think I’m a spoiled brat. Others think I have found the secret to human happiness. Let me explain.

I have a job. I get paid for what I do. Under “Occupation” on forms, I know what to write. I pay income tax because I have an income, but I don’t for a moment think of what I do as “work.” Work implies “hard.” Work implies there might be suffering involved. Work is not voluntary. Work has a nasty “have to go to it” side. Some work even has a dress code involving neckties and pantyhose. Work has “business hours” and “overtime.” But the most dreadful feature of work is that it is not fun. Because if work was fun, we wouldn’t call it work, would we? No. We’d call it fishing or bowling or in my case, teaching yoga. That’s why I don’t work.

I used to work, though. That’s why I know so much about it. It’s also why I refuse to do it. And it’s not because I am a spoiled brat. It’s because I am going to die. Hopefully not soon, but eventually it will happen. And I don’t want to lie on my deathbed thinking that I spent my entire “working” life doing stuff I hated, stuff that felt like torture, hardship and suffering. Instead, I want to die feeling I played with and used up the whole toy box of skills I was born with, with joyful abandon.

Oprah writes a column in her magazine called, “What I Know For Sure.” I don’t claim to know this “for sure” but here is what I believe. I believe that everyone is born with a mission, a “vocation” if you will. This mission is implanted inside us like a computer chip. When we are doing jobs we love, we feel happy. When we feel happy, that’s the tip-off that we are in sync with our mission.

But when we suffer in jobs we hate, our chip starts to beep. It goes: “Beep! Beep! Beep! Unhappiness Alert! Change direction! Path Error!” When we hear this alert, which doesn’t always sound like a beep, but sometimes shows up as an intense feeling of nausea and dread at the thought of going to work, we must pay attention to it or risk spreading “unhappiness toxins” all over the place.

Think of it. If you teach and love to teach, your students feel it and they’re happy. If you are a lawyer and love seeing justice served, your clients and society are happy. If you make widgets and believe in the benefits of your widget, widget users everywhere are happy.

But if you hate what you do, you spread dissatisfaction and grouchiness and badly made products out into the world. Everybody who comes into contact with you, and the product of your work suffers.

So what I am saying is this: we must all stop working. Instead, we have a duty as human beings who will die someday, to find our mission, what we were put here to do, and then do it. When we find our thing we’ll know it because it will make us feel satisfied and worthwhile and happy to get up in the morning. It will intrigue and absorb us. On most days, it will almost feel like fun. If you find this thing and do it, some people may call you a spoiled brat. But then again, others may call you “enlightened.”

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email mainstreetyoga@gmail.com.