All your actions should be prayers.
It is amazing to observe that most of the people enveloped in sloth and lethargy are not aware that life on this earth is but a brief moment, and that moment should be utilized to purify the way of the soul. Those who live in such a fool’s paradise do not do their duties and yet expect the best from life. Freedom comes when you do your duties with love. You can use the duties you have assumed as a means to obtain the happiness that is the ultimate state of bliss. Whatever you do, do it with love, or don’t do it at all.
A human being cannot live without doing his duties, no matter how much he tries to escape. If you do not do your duties, there is no reason for you to live in the world. However if you do your duties without love you are only a slave to your duties.
Just because they are married, wife attends husband and husband attends wife, even though they actually don’t want to. They are doing duties toward each other merely as a formality. The only way to get freedom is to create love toward your duties and allow that love to grow. The question is: how to create love for your duties? You live with somebody, and after some time you get fed up and you want to change your partner. In your relationships you expect someone to love you, and that someone also expects you to love him. And so in this way love comes to mean expectation. And it is expectation that leads to misery. You are expecting so much from the world, but the world has very little to give you and so you become disappointed. This is why you go from one object to another, and you examine all the objects of the world, hoping to find something that will give you joy. Even when finally you achieve that for which you have worked your whole life, thinking it will give you joy, still you feel dissatisfied. You have not understood that no object has the power to give you joy; only your mind and heart can give you joy. Understand yourself within if you really want to be successful in the external world. Practise love by expressing love to others through selfless action.
Love means to give without any expectation.
Reprinted from: The Ancient Traveler: Writings on Love, by Swami Rama