A Place to Stand
I have contemplated work for the last three years. What is it? What am I doing, who am I doing it for, and what is the compensation? Is my time worth this work? My shift has been glacier, but steadily I have moved away from the work that came easily to me to that which feels less like an excuse and more like a reward for having lived so long.
“Give me whereon to stand”, said Archimedes, “and I will move the earth.”
I’ve asked this of myself – of the universe – of anyone around me who would listen. My work is ? I’m a writer by trade, and so I found my calling in my book that I’ve been writing. I’m about to workshop Chapter Seven of a 10 chapter book – a primer and memoir combined. A book that is needed and I believe will be received.
Meanwhile, there is other work – there is legacy work that entangles me but sustains me, and there is ongoing work to try to keep a conversation about parenting through an anti-racism lens. There is community work, there is social justice work, and there is my work with the girls in Ghana – to help them along their journey. There is a lot of work to be done.
David Whyte wrote:
Good work like a good marriage needs a dedication to something larger than our own detailed, everyday needs; good work asks for promises to something intuited or imagined that is larger than our present understanding of it. We may not have an arranged ceremony at the altar to ritualize our dedication to work, but many of us can remember a specific moment when we realized we were made for a certain work, a certain career or a certain future: a moment when we held our hand in a fist and made unspoken vows to what we had just glimpsed.
[…]
Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Like the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience and maturity it demands of me.
My friend in Boston sent me David Whyte’s Consolations, with his musings on many topics. This he wrote of Work:
To reduce work in our societal imagination merely to competition, and to the act of beating the competition, is to condemn our societies, our communities and our individual lives to imaginative poverty of the very worst kind. In the real world it is also an isolating approach that closes off the possibilities of cooperation and conversation across scientific boundaries and artful borders. In the mystery of real contact and of real creativity, as in the lover’s embrace, there is no abstract other and no competition. With the right work, the right relationship to that work and the mystery of what is continually being revealed to us through our endeavors, we find a home in the world that eventually does not need debilitating stress, does not need our exhausted will and does not need enormous amounts of outside energy constantly fed in to sustain it. We give a gift, not only through what we make or do, but in the way we feel as we do, and even, in the way others witness us in our feeling and doing, giving to them as they give to us, as fellow lovers, fellow struggling marriages: with a person, with a work, with a craft, attempting to keep the conversation alive with the core mystery of what makes us make; a gift that is twice given, physically in the present and imaginatively in the future; a work and an identity that holds both together, not only for an end, but for every step that shapes an onward way.
Work is a gift, it is both given and received. It is a relationship. It is a marriage of sorts. As my work unfolds differently, changing before my eyes, I am confident that what I seek is seeking me. And today I took one step closer to that reality.
