November 28, 2006
Essay 2: The Meaning of Work
J. Emery Davidson
ENGL 101 BO1
Usefulness in Becoming Chameleon-like
“Hard work is healthy, but in this age of narrow specializations, it is wise for workers to gain wide varieties of experience for other options in the event worker conditions or capabilities diminish, or the vocation becomes outsourced or limited. A broad range of experience allows workers powerful real-life comparisons and helps them discover which types of work they find most meaningful.”
This is what spun through my head on a 1999 Ski Season Sunday, as I delivered some magazines to the dilapidated wooden rack outside the old Ketchum Post Office. While standing in a blizzard, a man gathering mail alongside his young boy, pointed to me and said, “Son, there’s the man who works all the time.” I noticed he didn’t say there’s a man, but rather the man. Was I the only one working on Sunday again? Everybody else was off skiing or watching ball games, having fun in multitudes of ways, I imagined. And here I was again, holding the bag over magazines, safe from wet snow. However, I smiled as I worked. Friends tried to tell me that I was a fool in the rain to do so. “How can you be so happy today, when everybody else is doing what he or she wants to?” They asked. My concerned friends recommended that I branch out to make other options available, in the event something occurs to lessen my broad smile in the rain.
Intellectually I comprehended what they meant. But I was unready to rush off and reinvent myself at the drop of a spud. A likeable lassitude comes along with being considered big and stupid - I should know. One’s blood pressure drops when intellectual pressures are not pushed onto a worker to the point of impossible concentration.
But, what if my big galoot body starts slowing up? What if I begin having difficulty hauling armoires, Wurlitzer’s and pool tables up staircases to Escher-less ends? Shouldn’t I be embracing other talents, perhaps brushing up on trick billiard shots, to win pool bets? That could be equally as dangerous, considering the frequency of fisticuffs around poolrooms like the Mint.
Mulling this over, I scribed a long list of winners whose work ethics I admired, to glean some advice, to help dissect the complexity of finding meaningful work. The people I listed usually had good ideas that rubbed off to me. Clearly, the wisest was Mary. I sensed something special about Mary from the moment I met her. Like most children, we had sprouted with quixotic intentions. However, in this harsh changing world, we found ourselves often needing to adapt, to keep the kids within in us from being crushed -via shape shifting our occupations when necessary.
Mary and I have both worked in some interesting places. We met in 1990 while working at the same municipality in Virginia. Some of the things she told me back then about her personal choices and sense of independence gained while reinventing her self, still resonate within me. When faced with livelihood dilemmas, I’ve often imagined, “What would Proud Mary do in this situation?” –and come out better for considering that. This consultation reinforces the significance of finding work that feeds self-esteem –and staying that path. In her early college years, Mary felt betrayed from several parameters in the field of journalism and switched her major to Geography. This betrayal matched much of what I went through recently with the “jaded” upper management of the Express newspaper (Nottingham).
Switching her major to Geography paid off later for a couple of self-respecting jobs, which Mary eventually transitioned into even better things. Mary says that she “chooses to thrive, rather than simply survive.” She has several times chosen to shift career-paths, to match her interests better. For instance, Mary followed her bliss through a curiosity about butterflies. This enthusiasm she nectared into a dream-job, becoming a butterfly museum curator and teacher. I mean, come on now, who in this weary world actually does that? This woman must be part-angel with invisible wings herself.
Not only that, but also a dozen years back she redoubled efforts of going to school while working to earn a massage certificate. This led into bodywork connecting her with physical, spiritual, emotional and energetic realms. It’s inspiring to see exertion towards well-defined goals like this pay off for a friend. She has also worked as a bike mechanic, been drawn in by outdoor tracking & spiritual workshops and is especially fond of crepuscular activities of the natural world. When her upper body became worn from giving so much, she took up Ashiatsu -a method of giving massage with feet while hanging from installed bars above. This reinvention of rubdown actually gets deeper into the tissue due to the fuller weight applied down on the body.
When I recently wearied, finding my long held job no longer psychically rewarding and quit, I did not feel as though I needed to be out the next Monday morning jack hammering to keep busy, but rather planned to hold out until I could make something more meaningful materialize. I don’t want to find out five years down the road that I made another huge mistake, by falling in with another abusive employer, especially considering that in the past, I’ve had potential employers literally stand on their heads to try and attract me into their firms.
Being at a fork in the road of one’s future involves magnanimous decision-making. The big question is, how long can I hold out? Certainly, I don’t want to drop into the same sort of narrow trap, many intelligent purposeful people sink into- to paraphrase George Monbiot, “by being used as a tool of the corporate or institutional world -doing the complete opposite of what it is you want to do –thinking not for yourself, but for the institution” (Monbiot).
While my gap in gainful employment has already become longer than I had anticipated (100 days), I still do not regret quitting. Rather I wish I had quit earlier, so that I might have brushed up on other significant vocational skills. Every job I’ve worked, I’ve given my best. Retaining this habit is important when stuck in jobs that seem to hold empty meanings. I’ve found that maintaining a level work ethic can get you recognized and someday lead into real jobs. However, putting “all of your eggs into one basket” like I recently did, dedicating virtually every waking (and many dreaming) moments to only one place for too long, rusts older unexercised work skills. Once, when I asked for a leave of absence for a few months (not granted) the boss looked at me astounded and said, “What would you do?” in a tone that presumed how could I possibly have a life besides the paper.
Perhaps I should have seen the impending doom whipping down the Express-pike. Once, when the paper was short-handed by four men, I made an announcement in an all-staff meeting that we needed help. Of the twenty-some odd employees in the room, zero raised their hands. Had I any balls at the time, I would have slammed the door shut on them then, instead of waiting another seven years. But, things go wrong at every job, I figured and I was still fresh to management. Alas, the work environment worsened. Many of the dedicated workers in circulation were outcasts on the fringe of society. Perhaps this is why I was such a good manager for these people –I understood what it’s like to be a proverbial lyndworm chucked out the window, fending for one’s life in whatever way one can, rolling in the dirt to construct some sort of body armor from the earth to protect our fragile squirming interior beings. As our Circulation operations expanded, workers who called in –last minute sick or didn’t show up at all –resulted in frequent helter-skelter mornings. Repeatedly canceling my long-planned family vacations, due to worker shortages forced me to start thinking outside the box called 591 First Ave N.
I believed that Mary would have thought along the same lines.
I did stay on a bit longer than planned, when an appealing in-house reinvention evolved. The editor asked me to come aboard to the editorial department, and it should have been one of the happiest days of my life. It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve 2004 and Ken announced that I would replace Adam Tanous as a monthly columnist. The editor said, “I think that Jim should get paid for what he’s already been doing”. I had been drafting suggestions and story outlines for several years. My broad background helped, giving me much to select for commentaries. In addition, I became the best news tipster, developing an eye for stories, and gathering ideas while delivering publications throughout the community.
The Publisher hemmed and hawed like the Grinch before Christmas about even anteing up a nominal fee. Still, I did not miss a beat; glidingly sleighing in the comment, “Just wait and see how good they are.”
I pledged that I would do my best and dedicated my being to these columns. In splendid solitude, I scribbled ideas passionately, unable and not wanting to stem the flow. Elaborate thoughts formulated while driving and I pulled over to jot them down on sides of roads. I drifted off to sleep with clean pieces of paper and woke up with rough drafts. Writing became a healing meditation, massaging the mind. My imagination went wild.
Some might say I went overboard with this new passion, while spending less time with friends: A few times, I dreamt about reading lost Scripture, which went into vivid detail about the interconnectedness of everything. When I woke, I wondered who had scribed them. How had something so elaborate come to me in dreams? Were they old thoughts, jotted in the Atlantis atmosphere dawn of dawn’s -from, which we have been backpedaling? Now vanished from temporal realms, secreted into tablets, sunk at the bottom of Redfish? Waiting for a church camp counselor to discover, while reinventing his beliefs on a mercurial dip to the bottom of the sea. Blending beside chameleonic mermaids loving everything. Embracing and dancing on everlasting angel pin nuclei, the neutrinos themselves re-scripting stage plays and term papers about the permanence of unseen subatomic level changes?
While burning the midnight oil I was fired up over ideas, but never frustrated with the writing process itself. Exhilarating thoughts transformed into solutions through my fingertips to the keyboard. I spent between fifty and a hundred hours on each column, which means the pay, equaled seventy-five cents an hour. Although this low pay was killing me, to maintain my inner peace, I aimed high with eighteen months of hardscrabble perseverance, purposely blinding myself to the B.S. emanating from upper management, in hopes of landing in a better spot.
This reminded me of eighteen miserable months that Mary went through at a no longer rewarding job - working beside someone she did not find particularly life giving for vesting in a retirement plan.
My eighteen months went by. I then soul-searched about what had transpired with work. I saw that abuse and deception had become systematically worse. Whole departments were not communicating with each other in a business that purported to be a leader in the valleys communications! The best employees were jumping ship for good reasons. I realized that as an advice columnist, I would be hypocritical to not take my own counsel and followed suit. When I quit, my boss tossed my belongings out into the alley, snarled and slammed the door tight, not thanking me for thirteen years of unimpeachable efforts. Seeing true colors displayed like this, confirmed for me that I was right to migrate away, from this acme of barrenness.
When it starts raining cats and dogs, even a fool knows to come out of the rain, dry off and put on a new set of clothes. I believe for me, now that I have found writing to be such a passionate force in my life, I’ll need to submit my work to an outlet where I better fit in and feel rewarded without having to “force it.” Perhaps soon, the same man from the Post Office blizzard will point at me again, this time telling his teenage son, there’s another weathered man who shifted brainstorms.”
When this happens, you can believe, I’ll mention it to Mary.
Works Cited
Klinkel, Mary. Electronic-mail interview. 03 October 2006[1]
Nottingham, Brad. Work letter of recommendation to Wood River Journal. 25 July 2006
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