On Loving Work

 

I’m not a workaholic, for I can relax and be away from work without becoming anxious. But I do love to work. Intellectual and emotional labor is what my current job entails. I’m a well-trained listener and invite people to share details, stories, and memories of their lives. I notice patterns, phrases, and perhaps most often, what’s absent from speech but somehow here between us. That’s where I gently probe. My career requires concentration, presence, and effort, but it doesn’t exhaust me and is never boring.

I need physical work to be happy as well. My favorite vacations are visits with people who need my help with some project, or travel to beautiful places where I can hike each day. Walking the Camino de Santiago was sublime pleasure for me. I prefer having a destination when I walk.

Work provides purpose, which keeps the life force moving through me. I have noticed that people who retire without a project often turn their health into their life’s purpose. Couples with nothing new to create once the family is raised have a harder time staying together.

As I descended to the basement for a second time this morning, I realized that this kind of physical effort to clean, replenish supplies, and release what no longer serves is what connects me to humans throughout time.

Our ancient connection to the actual work of staying alive played a big part in my love of camping: making a shelter, building a fire, cooking food and cleaning up to prevent animal encroachment feels primal and satisfying. Resting in that deep lap of time brings comfort.

It’s always seemed ironic that the work of tending bodies and souls of children, the old, and the ill pays the lowest wages in this society, whereas abstract work with money, paper, and numbers pays so highly. I’ve come to believe that the intrinsic reward of work that has immediate value offsets the low wage while work that has been made up and doesn’t serve people in a tangible way requires more monetary reward to justify itself. It's  not just but it makes a perverted sense.

Since the start of the pandemic, many people have devoted additional labor to their yards and houses. Now that we are spending more time at home, why not make it completely functional, even beautiful?  The privilege of this work is not lost on me: too many Americans are unhoused, and encampments in parks have highlighted the crisis we face and must resolve.

We have collective work ahead of us. Establishing practices, policies, attitudes, and systems that don’t let anyone fall through the cracks will call upon all our talents, energies, and ancient knowledge. Such work can renew our sense of purpose, connection, and joy. 

I’m ready.