Work/Love
I’ve heard marriage be described as a date you went on where both of you decided you never wanted to leave. That’s how I feel about my marriage, and it took years of Anthony and me being together for me to grow less astonished that we were allowed to spend all our time with each other.
I was thinking the other day that this is how I feel about cooking for a living. It’s like I took my Sunday hobby and decided to keep doing it and never went back to work. At the end of a weekend, I don’t have that apprehensive sense of “impending Monday” that means an end to my real, free self and the emergence of my shadow work self. I was in the woods in a hammock when I had this thought, and laughed out loud to the birds and bugs in actual delight. To spend every day working with food, and vegetables in particular. Touching them, transforming them, bringing out their best flavors. I can’t believe that’s what I get to do.
But as I dig a little deeper into this thought, I know I don’t really mean that work is a hobby. (Or for that matter, that marriage is a date.) I feel conflicted about the aphorism, If you love what you do, you’ll never have to work a day in your life. If by “work,” we mean labor — the actual performance of work — it’s a dangerous message to send. Work is not free time. It’s an exchange of money for services in an unequal power relationship. Conflating work and leisure leads to exploitation, like not paying people enough or expecting them to be on call all the time. But “work” means many other things in our society, and another way to characterize it is: being forced to do what you don't agree with.
And this is what I'm feeling liberated from, lately. Sitting through meetings that feel pointless, or trying to make the best of projects that are badly scoped or that you don’t think should be done in the first place. The labor involved in sitting quietly at a conference table is less than making 500 balls out of a box of cucumbers but the former feels more like work to me because of how unproductive it is. Sometimes I don’t want to be at the restaurant, obviously. I’m tired and want to go home or it’s nice out and I want to be with my friends at the park. That’s okay; we can’t be at leisure 100% of the time. But the work I do now affords me a kind of joy that is almost embarrassing to admit to in our cynical culture.
Almost. I try not to be embarrassed about wanting love and joy, though these things are so deeply associated with corny, misleading inspirational messages. That’s unfortunate, because their rewards are ultimately much greater than cool nonchalance. Marriage and work are two examples of institutions originating in exploitation that I believe can coexist with love. It must be possible to stay realistic about these institutions but committed to something deep that drives you to be part of them. I want to be hard enough to protect myself but soft enough to have something to protect.
So stay loving, y’all. Stay soft.
What I’m reading
All About Love: New Visions, by bell hooks
Often, workers believe that if their home life is good, it does not matter if they feel dehumanized and exploited on the job. Many jobs undermine self-love because they require that workers constantly prove their worth…
Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being. No wonder then that we have become a nation where so many workers feel bad. Jobs depress the spirit. Rather than enhancing self-esteem, work is perceived as a drag, a negative necessity. Bringing love into the work environment can create the necessary transformation that can make any job we do, no matter how menial, a place where workers can express the best of themselves. When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It’s not what you do but how you do it.