Be Pro!

                    Introducing professionalism in private life

The shame! We give our best to strangers (workplace, public), best being the faculty to concentrate, as well as discipline, ritual, creativity, contract, time-table, dead-line, penalties, incitements; whereas the leftovers do we reserve to our dear ones (children, parents, friends): approximation, why not, improvisation, naturalness; amateurism. We may be major leaguers at work, sometimes – rarely - in society, but at home we are hardly little leaguers. Thus, our passions and our “true self” are consumed with persons unknown or almost, while petit-bourgeois pleasures do we enjoy with our kids and lovers.

Intensity goes with less, pleasures go with more; hence the battle we have to declare on Too Much. To be professional: in parenting, in loving, in friendship, in accompanying a dying mother, in mourning this very same mother – is part and parcel of this noble aim. To be a pro is to be immunized against whatever is irrelevant to that which is at stake in this particular moment. To be a pro is to suspend the rest. To be a pro is to refuse excess. It is to die to the world at large and to live in the present.