If You’re Lucky, Work And Play Blend Nicely

The last column of the year has always been my favorite to write. Whether the year has been good or bad, it’s a ritual time of reflection.

I’ve written in the past about love and failure; I’ve written about passion for life, about thinking skills for the new society we’re creating and about philosophical mantras that can get you through ambivalent times.

This year I want to write about work and the value it has brought to my life.

I know it’s an odd topic when so many people are working too much, but it’s what I’m thinking about. This has been a year, for me, of good work.

I’ve always been a worker, given that lucky metabolism that has excess energy and parents who modeled hard work as basic to a good life. I don’t remember being assigned chores; I don’t think I knew as a child that there was a division between work and play. My memory blends them all together - mucking out stalls in the barn, harvesting alfalfa, brushing my horse, cleaning my saddle. What I loved were outdoor chores. Somehow, I don’t remember washing dishes, although I must have.

My brother and I both had jobs by the time we were 11, delivering The Spokesman-Review together. I don’t remember being told to get a job, we just did. It was a very American thing to do in the 1950s. In England, where we were born, we would have finished grade school first.

The only time I didn’t want to work was during college. I was a housekeeper and a server in the dining halls. I envied students with the time and money to hang around talking about big thoughts and feeling the excitement of learning. I still wish I could have gone through college with the freedom to read and do everything.

But I have that freedom now and it is such a gift.

I have somehow ended up with the lifework of the student I wanted to be. I work hard, but it is not hard work. I feel like the child I once was, who did not know about the divisions between work and play. Sure, I don’t like to pay bills, bring in groceries, take out the garbage, but it doesn’t matter, it seems part of life.

My stepdad cleans out the chicken house for me. I don’t have to go to endless meetings, I don’t have to put up with people or rules that seem like a waste of time. I run my own business, and, in that sense, my own life; that’s a very American way to be.

My family works the same way. They are entrepreneurs designing their own work and working hard, including Mom at 81. Sometimes it’s scary for us, paying our own health insurance, facing lost contracts or slow times, but it’s good work because it’s yours; you make the difference.

Sigmund Freud, in one of his more worthwhile insights, wrote that happiness requires “work and love.” Love to feel valued and human, work to feel engaged and contributing.

I am against too many government entitlements because it takes away the feeling that you are charting your own destiny, taking responsibility, putting your mind and body to work every day.

I don’t understand people who prefer welfare to earning the same amount of money working. They say it’s not worth it to work. My dad spoke even of work in the Wales coal mines during the 1930s as good work.

I cannot imagine what it must feel like to not work. I consider home maintenance and parenting real work. There is a difference between floating through life, inside or outside the home, and working through life. The difference is a sense of being connected: to your body because you use all its resources, your mind because you challenge it, your environment because you offer your energy to it, and your community because you are more than just a resident. Play also has its wonders. It is the blend that makes the difference.

I don’t know when Americans began to shy away from work as pleasure. Maybe when workers were separated from their crafts and became assembly line cogs in the 1950s. When did too many of us separate from that good feeling of knowing you have put what you have into a day, a week, a life? When did we lose or rename our work passions and long for early retirement?

That’s what work, at its best, is - passion. Good work is building, serving, testing, stretching, heavy breathing, pushing ourselves, satisfying. Good work is reliable passion.

Last night, my son and I were talking about his college classes. He has returned to school to gain, in his words, “the chance to find my passions and stretch my mind.” He described his mind, now that he is back in school, as “waking up.” I used the term “percolating.”

He is tapping into the incredible possibilities of seeing the world through an alive, engaged mind. He has always liked physical labor and he now wants both his mind and body engaged.

I thought of all the things I had failed to do for him, the perfect childhood he never had. But here was something wonderful I had given him - a sense of a life of work that satisfies the soul.

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jennifer James The Spokesman-Review