"pati"

What will I do today? Idle hours give me time to punch myself with a feeling of duty. It's a violent thing, really, the want for continuance, for weight. Competitiveness, but really not against anything or anyone in particular, rather with oneself. Or with a certain voice inside, holding a pocket-watch and pointing to the second hand. Come to think of it, it could actually be the voice of your own heart. Not the one we imagine gives relationships importance, but rather that organ which keeps us alive, and keeps us on task. We are cursed with being a certain kind of walking bomb. Every movement, every activity, every decision is precisely held into rhythm by something at our centre. What a strange image.
Today I read on some random person's profile that Aristotle said nothing is meaningful if paid for. Or something of the sort - deriding the monetary gains and doing things for other purposes. I do not even really know if this is reliable information, and I don't have my copy of Poetics with me, so perhaps it is just another convenient neoclassical ideal. But it did bring about a dialogue in my head about the science of earnings. Especially as I am working with something that most would not consider a job. Where is the line drawn, between my passion and my monetary means? Or the simple feeling of working for something versus the feeling of having to work. If you read it with different intonations, it could mean vice-versa.
And if passion comes from the same root as patience - pati to endure in Latin, it speaks of hardship, of suffering. Hence the feeling of duty in my passion, perhaps?