July 2015: work
Work, to us, possesses its own universe of values, rooted in how we spend and use time, how we find ourselves fulfilled in life (or not), how we value ourselves as individuals. The great Annie Dillard wrote that "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." For most of us, this means that our lives shall be spent working. It also seems that most of us are also trying to find meaningful work, meaning that we are, as always, in search of meaningful lives. Here we enter the vast, complex internet of ideas we relate to work, including how we go about performing it, how it is tied to our material or financial state, and the morality with which we infuse how work is done.
The culture in which we find ourselves asks many questions: when we do we work? When do we play? Is playing the opposite of working? Is our work our "calling"? Are we "working hard or hardly working"? Should we live to work or work to live? Must we choose one or the other? We can be telecommuters or workaholics, busy as bees or members of the rat race. We might strive to improve our social standing through work, or be assigned a career or livelihood based on where we stand within a socio-cultural stratum.
woodcut by Clare Leighton, from Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle
Our work, and our relationship to the concept, defines our identity in the way of all other things we employ to define ourselves: by connecting our individual piece to the system, to the dynamic whole.
Read more on this month's blog. It's off to work we go.