Paying Attention to Work
Sometimes I get tired. Tired of moving houses. Tired of working out. Tired of trying. I’m just tired. I know I’m not alone, because the whole world looks tired. Every where I turn, I find a familiar sentiment settling in—work empties us. Too much work leaves us feeling washed away, like sand between our toes on an ocean’s shore. We remember times we pushed ourselves to a breaking point, and tried to be everything all the people in our lives needed all at once. We are tired of doing everything we can to never return to those times again. But what if it was never the work that made us tired? What if it was all the pretending? What if it was the weight of continually suppressing our spiritual needs for the sake of placating our ego? Let’s not pretend it wasn’t about us at all. Humans like to work. We hunger for challenge—spiritual growth, relational love, the pursuit of passion, building something to share with a community, delayed satisfaction, creativity, and more. We long for the burden of devotion. Physical, mental, and spiritual work makes us both happier and healthier. Trouble does come along when we substitute one for all three or when we believe we can be perfect at any of them. And of course, we made the destination—what the work gets us—too important. The only “finish line” is death, and that’s debatable. Sometimes, out of reflex, we retreat, believing if we only do what we enjoy, we will be safe from burnout or resentment. I will only do as I please, and love every minute of it, we might think. We may even quote something like Mary Oliver’s famous poem about a summer day:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Those last two lines are famous. When we read the poem in its entirety, we get the sense that presence is enough. It’s easy to forget how Mary, who did roam the fields and spend hours looking at the geese and grasshoppers, also labored in her office over every syllable and painstakingly shaped and shared the world she loved. The most difficult challenge isn’t the work of building, holding, carrying, serving, and failing. The painstaking struggles come in sifting out the areas we do those things for no good reason at all, finding every way and place we hide, and learning how to value any simple task we do with love over any monumental effort we do without it.