That idea is dangerous. If you want to do something important you will never be able to do it; that’s the danger of it. People who enjoy doing small things do important things because they have the relaxed attitude needed to do the important. Once the idea gets into your head that you have to do something special, something important, momentous, then you lose all peace; all calm is lost, and you become so strained. How can the important thing happen through it? The important happens only when you are playful. But if you want it to happen you are serious, that’s the paradox.
All that has happened in the world, which is important in any way, has always happened through playfulness, all great inventions are out of playfulness. Be playful! Forget about the important, because behind the important the ego is hiding. Why bother about the important? Once we are gone, everybody forgets about us. Within five hundred years nobody will remember you, so why bother?
Just think of people who lived 500 years before us: they were doing great, important things and making much fuss about it, much ado about nothing. Where are they? Everybody will go down the drain, so why bother? Why waste time? Doing important things means that when you are gone people will remember you. But people are not bothering about you; you are not bothering about anybody else. In fact, children hate history. Who wants to read history and who wants to remember those stupid names? Those people were doing great things and all that they have done is made history, which poor children have to remember. That’s all that they have done so why bother?
Live your life joyously, and out of it important things happen. Not that people will remember them, but they will be important in the sense that you get such joy out of them, that you feel so fulfilled in doing them, that you are tremendously grateful that you lived, that you breathed, that you were able to write a poem or make a garden. Not that the garden is going to remain forever, nothing remains forever, but the joy was in your creating it.
And have you observed one very significant factor? Whenever a person has created something, he loses all interest in it. This is something psychological: a painter is so much into his painting, yet once the painting is finished, he never looks at it again, he is finished with it.
Psychologists have been perplexed, have been very much intrigued by it; why is it so? The person was putting so much energy for years together into writing a book and yet when the book is published, he never reads it. He was putting so much life and energy into it – for what? Psychologists have missed the point: the point is not the outcome; the point is the joy that is derived while they are creating it. The point is not in when the book or the poem or the painting is finished. The joy is while they are doing it, the joy is in its very creation. In that moment they are intoxicated with creation, they are lost in it. It is meditative.
I call a thing important for no other reason than this: that you are lost in it. For example, I am talking to you. It is important because I am lost in it. I have forgotten the whole world; here only you exist for me and nobody else! It is important. Whether anything will come out of it or not is immaterial, irrelevant. I enjoy it – looking into you, communing with you. I enjoy the way you listen and receive it. The result has no value; the very process is important.
Abridged from Let Go by Osho