REsources for Living
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“Do what you love,” the saying goes, “and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I figure this saying could go a couple of ways. One possibility is that if you spend your life doing work that you love, then all those work hours are a pleasure rather than a chore.
Now, I don’t know a single person whose work life doesn’t include doing at least some percentage of tedious grunt work, but there’s a lot to be said for loving your work. I say that as someone who has what is possibly the best job in the world. I’m a minister who gets to enjoy preaching and connecting with members of the congregation, but doesn’t have to worry about fixing the boiler or whether the chairs got properly arranged in the sanctuary. I’m also a religious educator who gets to write curricula and other materials for families, without having to worry about getting, storing and cleaning up craft supplies. I work with people I genuinely like and admire, using skills I’ve worked hard to hone.
I am incredibly, ridiculously lucky, and I certainly know that work that doesn’t feel like work is a rare and wondrous thing. I’m also keenly aware that “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” could have a completely different meaning. If you only do what you love, you might never find work at all.
I say this as the mother of a 20-year-old who is following her dreams and trying to make it as a professional dancer. Never working a day at her passion might be something of an overstatement, but the money for doing what she loves is pretty darn limited, and days of paid work as a dancer are few and far between. As her mother I’m enormously proud of her commitment to doing what she loves, but there’s also a protective maternal part of me that would love to see her go to school to train for some field of work that might not be as big a passion as dancing, but would be more fulfilling and more lucrative than the kinds of jobs she’s working to make ends meet as she pursues dance.
We humans, I think, need both work and play. We need to be able to support ourselves, and our dependents if we have any. We want to feel that we are responsible, contributing members of society—and our society is all too quick to define our responsibility and our usefulness in terms of what we do for work. But we also need play. We need things that lift us beyond the ordinary, that feed our souls and bring us deep joy. We might work very hard at those things that feel like play—my daughter, for instance, has twice-weekly dance classes that run for five hours. That’s a whole lot of intense mental and physical effort! But the joy, the experience of “flow,” of being caught up in something that takes you beyond yourself, can turn even enormous effort into play.
Now, some of us are blessed to encounter bits of that experience of “flow,” or play, in the course of our work lives. And if you can find your way into work that allows you to play, that’s an amazing gift that I highly recommend.
But we all know that a lot of work is just work—we do what we need to do to pay the bills, and if the bills get covered, well, that’s a good month. But I heard a podcast the other day—I think it was Freakonomics—that really made me think about work, and what we get out of it. They talked about a study in which researchers interviewed people who did a variety of different jobs about the meaning they found in their work. What I most remember is that they talked with people who worked cleaning rooms in a large hospital. And they asked about whether these folks thought anyone with the physical strength and stamina could do their job. And a lot of folks said yes, that theirs was a low-skill, boring job that pretty much anyone could do. But some percentage of the respondents were clear that what they brought to the job was special, and that people who could do what they did were rare. And it turns out they were right.
The people who felt they brought something unique to their job didn’t think of what they were doing as simply cleaning rooms—they were attending to the needs of vulnerable, hurting people. They were caring for patients whose lives were made better by the direct comfort provided by the custodial staff. And these workers found both meaning and interest in bringing imagination as well as compassion to their work. One woman, for instance, went so far as to regularly rearrange the artwork on the walls of a patient who had been non-responsive for weeks. She couldn’t know what, if anything, the patient was aware of, but she figured that if you were aware, and couldn’t turn your head, it would be better to have some variety in what you are able to see. Not everyone brings that kind of caring and creativity to their work, and this custodian was justifiably proud of what she brought to her job.
Now, finding meaning in your work isn’t really the same thing as finding play. But it isn’t entirely unrelated. Even the things we do for play—sports or playing music or making art—involve a lot of repetition of small tedious drills or tasks. But we can sink ourselves into those tasks with gratitude because they are a part of something that we have chosen, something that we delight in, something that feels meaningful. At work or at play, we are people who have chosen the path of the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” We build meaning as we go, whether in free play or in responsible work. Which sounds like it just might be within reaching distance of doing what you love.
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