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from it, then you tend to overburden that realm in which you are proficient.
This overdoing is the problem. One must not be an expert twenty-four hours a day; one must also do something in which one is a no one and about which one knows nothing. One must be a child sometimes: playing, immature, unknowing, ignorant.
Every genius has a child in him; no genius can exist without a child inside him -- this child is the source of all his energy! Because of the child within him, sometimes he can be a novice, sometimes he can be totally ignorant: he can touch realms about which he knows nothing. A mathematician who turns to poetry is never a loser. He comes back to his mathematics with a purer mind, with new experiences that are unknown to mathematics.
Nothing has ever been invented or discovered by someone who is strictly professional. It is always discovered by one who approaches the subject like an outsider coming with the mind of a child. Only a child is inventive, never an old man. The old man is an expert, and an expert cannot invent. He will go on repeating the same thing, doing it and overdoing it; he will make it more perfect but never new. A professional cannot contribute anything new to knowledge because he knows too much; he cannot see the new, he is always oblivious to the new. Professionals are always orthodox, they are never revolutionaries. They cannot be -- their very being is heavy.
Whenever it happens that a scientist turns to poetry, or a poet turns to mathematics, or a businessman turns to painting, or a painter becomes a sannyasin, then something new is born. And to give birth to something new is blissful; otherwise your daily work becomes dull and boring. Man cannot work like a machine -- he cannot go on just producing the same things mechanically, repeating the same routine endlessly. If he goes on doing this, he will be completely dead long before he dies. He will only know that he has been alive when death comes.
If you are just functioning mechanically as a human machine, there is every danger that you will be replaced by a humanlike machine, and you can never be at ease, because whatever you can do can be done
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