Day 89
job
Returning to the kind of work where I use my body all day has left me exhausted. I feel the years that I have added to my bones since I last did manual labor all day for days and days in a row. The lifting, moving, crouching, scrubbing, vacuuming…
There is a particular kind of satisfaction though. In every office job, desk job, or administrative job I have had, I asked the question “What am I doing here, besides making money?” Most of the time, my answer to that question felt a bit weak. It isn’t that I wasn’t doing good work, or taking pride in doing the work well. It is more that I just wasn’t fully invested in whatever I was doing for my employer.
In the work I do now, I think I am often too busy, in a physical way, to be preoccupied with the same questions. It isn’t that the work is more important (certainly cleaning condos for tourists is not, relatively speaking, important.) But the physicality of it keeps me in my body, and in my body I understand work differently. I understand the simple exchange of my energy, strength, stamina and work ethic for payment.
For most of my life I have felt driven to do “important” work, and important was defined by my boss, by the culture I live in and by the expectations people had for me. Behind a desk, working for someone with a lot of money, I was just automatically more important than whoever was cleaning the office. I still have a part time job, and it is the job that rolls of my tongue easily when someone asks me what I do. The fact is, however, that I feel, in my body, more useful and more satisfied when I am cleaning. Using the whole body to do something completes me and keeps me grounded.
I have also started noticing that I look at folks who do physical work with a measured respect. I understand that not only are they doing work that many of us do not want to do, but that they are firmly in their bodies, that they are using all of their energy and strength every day. It is so important to remind ourselves of this when we see someone lifting something heavy, working in the hot sun or the cold of winter…doing whatever we dismiss as just manual labor.
