I'm allowing myself quite an idle day - if you count hiking as being idle.
At any rate - hiking ended just before noon - so in my postprandial, post-somnolent stupor, I pondered the nature of work. You see, it's Sunday so I enjoy being idle. Love it. Except for when I see Pat (landlady) working furiously in the garden, which makes me feel guilty because I am not helping her.
At any rate, on Sundays I generally derive a great deal of pleasure out of idleness. The same cannot be said on Mondays or Tuesdays or even Wednesdays because I am "supposed" to work on those days. I grew up with a strong work ethic - heck the work ethic I grew up with was downright fundamentalist.
And that led me to wondering "What is work?" I mean, idleness doesn't mean I'm just navel gazing. I was out hiking and I'm about to take Abby into the back 40 and so on. I am exerting myself.
My definition of work: a means to an end wherein the means gives no inherent pleasure.
So I could argue that working on a widget assembly line is work - unless, of course, I totally adore assembling widgets - thousands of them every day. But generally - the main goal is a roof over one's head and food on the table and how we get there (that's the pleasure) is through doing something we wouldn't otherwise do (assembling widgets).
Now - I look at what I call work. I have been writing since the day I could pick up a pencil. So is writing work for me? Yes and no. If no one paid me to write, I would still write - and do. But I wouldn't necessarily write the subject matter I am paid to. Still, if I wasn't being paid, I wouldn't write as much as I do, so is it really work? I love getting cheques in the mail and it truly doesn't matter to me whether I "earned" it or whether some lovely benefactor (the government) gave it to me.
Bottom line - if I am to be truly honest, I'd say that 90 percent of what I do is not work. I would write regardless.
And that's the secret to a truly happy life. Would you do what you are doing even if no one paid you to do it? If the answer is no, I think you have to find work where you can say, yes, I would do it anyway. Sometimes payment comes in forms other than the monetary ones. If the only reason you're cooking dinner is to win someone's approval, maybe you need to rethink your role as a cook. That's not to say earning approval is bad - just like earning money for doing what you like to do isn't bad - but is that the only reason or the major reason you're doing it? If the answer is yes, the quality of your life is leaking away.
Selfish? Maybe. But when your life is full of joy you spread that into the world. If you are not happy, how can you spread happiness to others? It's a bit like oxygen masks in airplanes. The instructions are: put your own mask on before helping your children with theirs.
And that's where pondering about work will get you. At least, that's where it got me.
Chop wood
Carry Water
Why?
To chop wood
And carry water
Ah, my favorite topic. I like your analysis of the difference between work and leisure, Goody. For me the difference is that work involves compulsion and criticism, meeting the expectations of somebody else who may not have realistic expectations.
ReplyDeleteI watch the boys on the basket ball courts practicing their layup shots for hours at a time and they all say they love it. You'd have to pay me a lot to get me to do that, and then I'd have to decide that I love it too. If those boys had never heard of basketball, and the school system introduced a course on layup shots, with marks and a punishment for failure, most likely those kids would hate it.
If I can just remember that there are alternative to the compulsion I feel to work, and therefore it isn't really compulsion, and I don't give a damn about criticism (a hard one for me), then I can manage to turn most work into a game, which of course it is.
Cheers.