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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Reflecting during this year’s Labour Day holiday (in March where I reside), I recalled some of the jobs—employment for which I’ve been remunerated—I’ve had. Since 1969, I’ve been a timber yard hand, printer’s assistant, railway clerk, fruit-picker and a sales rep. I’ve concreted swimming pools, built dwellings, gardened and sold books. I’ve been a musician and jingle writer, a student and a lecturer. Some work I performed alone; some with company. There were jobs endured, but the best were duties loved for and lightened by their mateship.
The “job satisfaction” of each could not be predicted on the basis of their status or location or character. In my first job (a timber yard), the struggle was to stay awake. Day after day, I held one end of a long measuring stick placed on logs, and wrote down their length as called out by someone at the other end of the stick. Phew!
After mixing up variously coloured, numbered forms for the NSW railways, I decided to call it quits as a clerk after just one day in the job, but a cheque duly arrived some months later. My gardening stint took the form of clearing rubbish, which I loaded into a Hillman ute that had no handbrake and a flat battery.
I also tried my hand at selling books door to door in the mistaken belief I would make a fortune. I may well have, had I not run into a former priest who trapped me in his Mooroolbark home for a couple of hours and harangued me about the failure of Christianity and religion.
Among the most rewarding were truck-driving and building. Truck driving in heavy traffic is a recipe for stress, but on the open highways, it was an education and a joy. There’s no better adventure and compensation than finding grace and good fellowship in new places and on new faces in the dots of road maps. The open road is also the perfect space for developing philosophers. We have hours of time to think and to collect thoughts and theories.
Which is what labouring on a building site also allows. In the dignity of sweat and salty exhaustion comes a sweet restfulness from seeing what is being shaped before one’s eyes over days and weeks and years. There’s satisfaction in creating something out of nothing and leaving a mark on the landscape. One leaves a site hoping that what has been effected through hard labour will survive modern living with its addiction to renovation via backyard bulldozers.
The joyous sensation of accomplishment suggests that we’re born for labour. Indeed, we find our measure in the rhythm of work. It is a necessity, a luxury and a condition for existence. Our line of work defines us and divides us. It draws us in and wears us out. We compete for work and resist the threat of our own deskilling, downsizing and unemployment even as we take the jobs of others away from them.
As family life demands more of us and as international capital and trade relationships change, we seek to keep working in some mode be it through flexitime, part-time, job-sharing or re-skilling.
Around the world we see the consequence: productivity is up, and so is work-related stress. The eight-hour day has long existed in Australia and was once a sign of progress. Now it’s a taken-for-granted principle—and largely ignored, especially when there’s that promotion, the recession and restructuring to worry about.
Forgetting rest and play, Jack is no longer a dull boy, but an ideal type. Although we belong to ourselves, we produce more than slaves ever did by taking work home, blaming ourselves for being “out of work” even if there’s insufficient to go around.
We live and talk as if our work is everything. But it isn’t and never has been. We were born for work, but also as for what comes after it—rest and play.
An ancient formula put it this way: work six days and rest the seventh (see Exodus 20). In our age, we have varied that by working five and resting two or playing two. Or we work five, rest one, and play one. Whatever our convention, the essence of it is this: too much play distracts us, too much rest makes us lazy, and work, alone, will do us in.
Balance is required and we cannot survive working competently, with due diligence, with longevity or with satisfaction if we do not break work with the Creator’s break. He who made us, knows how best to keep us going. It’s getting harder to do, but His original advice is still worth following.
Extract from Signs of the Times, August 2003.
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