Action is an Action

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
-- Robert Frost

In this quote, Robert Frost is saying that his goal in life is to unite what he has to do, his vocation, and what he likes to do, his avocation. For Frost and many of us alike, it is a daunting task to enjoy every action such that nothing seems like "work". But why is it that we favor certain actions and abhor some others?

Let's take an example of a young man who hates to take out the garbage. Now, it can be granted that the act of taking out the garbage is very simple in that one has to pick up a certain container, carry it outside, and empty it. Certainly, these actions have no intrinsic negative value; rather, the cause of the young man's negative attitude stems from the value that he assesses to the action. And this is true of all our actions that we favor and detest. If we received some recognition, praise, or any other positive reinforcement, we will start to like that action and similarly, we will avoid actions which bothered us in some way. Even when there is no value associated to the action itself, we ignorantly grant values based on our past and drastically limit our experience.

After an entire lifetime of adding to our pile of preferences, it becomes easy to see that our experience of life will be significantly mis-construed. Instead of acting at every instance, we will be just blindly reacting to our likes and dislikes. Actions are, after all, actions and if we want to live directly and spontaneously, we need to withdraw from our self-induced prison of value judgments. When we meditate, we observe these mind games and in becoming aware of them we learn the value of an action in itself and not its result.