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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

labor

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Labor and rest

Have you taken a day of rest and restoration this week? —Evangelical Friends Church Southwest

Sometimes it can be helpful to read one of my cultural traditions from another perspective. I’ve read most about the Sabbath recently from Jewish writers and evangelical Protestant theologians.

But today my devotional brought me this query from Quakers in the southwest region of the United States:

Have you taken a day of rest and restoration this week?” —Evangelical Friends Church Southwest

Why, yes, I said to myself. Yes, I have. And tomorrow I have the hard-won privilege of being able to take another.

On International Worker’s Day six days ago, many around the world commemorated the rights, regulations, and conventions that labor movements have fought for over the last few centuries.

The standard eight-hour work-day—which divides the 24-hour day into equal segments for work, sleep, and free time—is one such regulation. The two-day weekend is another. I’ve valued it most when my jobs have required I work through either Saturday or Sunday.

(Yes, labor at churches is still labor! Ask your nearby minister.)

But evangelical Quakers aren’t asking about regular rest in solidarity with international labor. Nor are they following the Seventh-day Adventist concern for the observance of the Ten Commandments or “moral law” on a specific weekday.

Rather, the Friends’ interest is in living in acknowledgment of God throughout life:

First generation Friends on the other hand did not feel that God was calling them to observe a particular sabbath day – much to the consternation of mainline Protestants. Small wonder after their meeting for worship these Friends would open their businesses and serve their fellow humans with honesty and caring. These Friends were, in other words serving the Lord even though, government officials often arrested the true Christians for ‘breaking the Sabbath.'” —Arthur Berk

“We do not need to long for a particular day,” Berk explains. “He is present always.”

That principle of pervading presence is the community’s historical status quo, but some Friends are experimenting with the rite of disrupting their typical schedules and choosing not to work as normal anyway.

Some, like the Jewish and allied community of the Reboot initiative, choose to unplug from the internet and mobile technologies and recenter with family and friends.

Even when it’s philosophically inconvenient, humans love habit and structure. And sometimes that tendency can help us recover attention, presence, and grounding that our wider culture’s habits make it hard for us to live into every day.

Having access to these benefits shouldn’t be a matter of privilege, and part of seeking a more just world has to mean changing our social cultures so that it no longer is.

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The meditative routine

A small child in a red hooded jacket carries water on her back. A man in dungarees and a straw hat follows closely behind her.
Photo credit: J Durham via morguefile

Chop wood. Carry water.” —Unknown

Every time you start to feel a little anxious, just put your head down and get to work.” —Janelle Belgrave

One of the things I find fascinating about work that I love is that my love and enjoyment doesn’t cancel out the tedium in the task.

Editing can include painstaking attention to quote marks and commas as much as it allows me to dive into examples and argument logic.

Development can include logging contacts with donors and updating their database records, not just connecting people who have resources with projects worth resourcing.

Research can include tracking quotes to their source and cleaning up references as much as marshaling facts and stories to make a sound point.

Congregational communications can include updating contact lists and making the same documents every few days just as much it includes holding space for people during the joys and challenges of their lives.

There are routines to every role. And even a bucket of water will get heavy if carried for long enough.

But there’s some wisdom in the old saying, “Chop wood. Carry water.” An extended version of this saying ties it to enlightenment or awareness: “Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.”

I’ve learned that even the tedium can be a meditation, that as I do the same thing again and again, I get to notice new things each time. I can focus my attention, and check in with the work rather than check out of it.

That task that is tedious can bring me a kind of calm in my workspace. The repetition is its own order, and reminds me that even grand work depends on small actions, and small actions are worth doing well.

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Using people, loving things

Love people, not things; use things, not people.”

Last night I watched a short Argentinian animation called “El Empleo” or “The Employment” (2011). Directed by  Santiago ‘Bou’ Grasso, the 6-minute no-dialogue short follows a man through the first few hours of his day.

The saying about loving people rather than things and using things rather than people goes back to the 1870s, and often appears unattributed in quote-photos or attributed to former LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball.

Perhaps it has survived over a century without losing force because our cultures keep needing the reminder not to transform people into mere utilities.

We are more than the sum of our practical functions. And we need our families, friends, jobs, and cultures to help us remember.

HT: Heart of the Art

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Don’t let it happen to you

An older man in a full-length light-colored trench coat and cap has his back to the camera and looks across the street at a large detached house. The photo is black-and-white with very pronounced shadows.
Photo credit: Frantzou Fleurine

A few years ago, articles about a new book flew around social media.

The book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying compiled the most frequent regrets of people who were dying. Author Bronnie Ware shared the respondents’ reflections with readers in the spirit of “Don’t let it happen to you.”

The five insights:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.” —Bronnie Ware

People at any age can read this list and check themselves, and this is probably why the list resonated with so many hundreds of thousands of people. Readers have shared the Guardian version of this article more than 200,000 times.

As a young professional and business owner, I’ve seen lists very similar to Ware’s end-of-life accounting from entrepreneurs laying down their businesses or retirees laying down their life’s careers. Wherever there’s an ending, there’s an opportunity for reflection and also regret.

“Nothing is as important as your health,” they say. “Cultivate deep interpersonal relationships,” they say. “Give yourself permission to be a human being,” they say.

And it’s all very interesting given how little structural support the United States’ labor law and customs offer us to put these wisdom pearls into practice.

Employees in this country work long hours, and entrepreneurs often work even longer, especially when just launching companies or products. It can take far too long, with costs far too high, for us to claw back some balance, wellness, quality social life, or family time.

How would it be if we didn’t have to push against a culture of overwork in order to live well? Laurie Penny asks this question in an article on the individualistic self-care movement.

The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while ‘the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.'”

Read the rest.