nine to five

I was reading The Catholic Worker newspaper on the C train home from work tonight (those unfamiliar with The Catholic Worker movement have probably never met me; all revolutionary-minded people should subscribe to their newspaper -- it costs one penny a year!). I wondered if the other people on the train thought I was a religious fundamentalist or something (I guess I am one, sort of, just with a different understanding of the fudament...)

Anyway, I was reading an article by my friend and old Haley House-mate Amanda which included this quotation, attibuted to a book called Sacred and Secular in Art and Industry by Eric Gill (further investigation reveals it to be from a lecture delivered in 1939):

Work is the means to living. The two things are inseparable. Recreation is a means to working and not the object for which we work. The object of recreation is to enable us to return to work refreshed, renewed, revived... But, in order to take such a view of work, the work must be good, it must be worth doing. Moreover, it must exercise our personality. It must be the work of persons.

I'd been on the C train about a couple of weeks before reading a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (it was one of those books that people are always pressing me to read, kind of like Atlas Shrugged or Jonathan Lvingston Seagull; I turned out to like it -- it's essentially a flowery self-help poem). This is one of the passages that jumped out at me:

But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret...
Work is love made visible.

I'm thinking of leaving my job. More than that, I know that I can't last in this position much longer. Once Christmas is past, I am going to very seriously begin working to advance to another, more desirable position in the agency where I work or start looking for something else altogether.

When I say that it is time to leave my job, though, I don't say it in quite the same way that a lot of people do. I love my job, or at least the essence of it, its core. I still can't believe that my position really exists or that I was able to find it. Despite the fact that I am ready to leave it, my job was and, in a sense, remains the perfect job for me.

I work for an affordable housing agency that develops and manages residences for low-income New Yorkers, primarily people with histories of homelessness, mental illness or other disabilities. To be working for such a good cause is, in itself, great. In every one of their residences, social services are provided for the tenants on-site. Brilliant model: it promotes independence but also provides a much-needed safety net for the vulnerable. What is my position, though? What's my role in all of this?

I build community. Those words are from my department's mission statement (which I basically wrote; my department consists of me). Through a variety of different methods (anything I can think of, really), I am supposed to connect the tenants in the building to one another and to the world outside. This could be anything from a big party (like the one I threw tonight) to exercise classes, a drama group, karaoke, a short story discussion society, a trip to a museum or a baseball game. I'm a social director with a slightly more high-minded mission; I facilitate healthy and growthful interaction and development among many different people.

I'm going through all of this at length because I need to remind myself how remarkable it all is. When I came to New York just over two years ago, I had no idea how I would be earning my salary. I knew that I wanted to do just work, honest work, work that I could be proud of. What I was more clear on was my "life's work": which was to create a space and a venue for community creativity. I wanted to find work that would contribute to my life's work. And I did.

The other night, my friend (and another former housemate, though from a different house) Kate, who works as a designer for a socially-conscious fashion firm told me she'd had an epiphany when someone said to her, "Wow, it sounds like you're doing exactly what you said you wanted to be doing." My friend Ben said something not dissimilar to me a year ago August, upon visiting me in New York and seeing my workplace, my living situation, etc. He said that, given the goals I'd set for myself while I was in grad school, it was hard to imagine me doing anything else that would come so close to achieving them.

It's important, I think, for me to step back sometimes from the day to day frustrations I have with my job, with non-profit bureaucracy, and with my unsupportive supervisor to say how rare and wonderful it is to be doing something that so clearly falls in line with my stated objective in finding work. Every day at work, at least three things (and usually several dozen) occur that reaffirm my certainty that I am makign a difference with what I do.

When I look on online dating profiles, the most telling category for me is always "occupation." (It amazes me that the new Friendster format places this field further down the page so you have to scroll before you see it.) I think this field tells you at least 65% of what you ought to know about a person, which is why I get frustrated by people who put down evasive answers like "bon vivant" or "pot-smoker." The challenge for me is to find a term that encompasses btoh my paid and my unpaid work. For a while, I was going with "theatrical activist," but that came off as too self-righteous; now I use "playmaking" (which is probably an oversimplification).

I'm not gonna lie to you -- the person's picture is the first thing I look at in an online profile. Sometimes, I don't even get past the picture. And I've certainly bookmarked a lot of hot people with jobs like "finance" or "public relations," but mostly because I'd like to have access to their pictures in case I want to masturbate. Moreso even than their taste in movies (a big one) I think a person's work reveals my potential compatability with them.

And I don't just mean paid work. I mean "life's work," which (as we've been exploring) is not always precisely the same thing. One prerequisite for me, I guess, is that someone have a life's work or at least be able to articulate what one might be. When I look back on my recent failed relationships, my partners would rather clearly have failed this test...

Marx's primary gift to human history was the concept of "alienation," particularly as it applies to one's labor. By this, I don't just mean that the modern worker doesn't have ownership of the product he manufactures, but also that he has no sense of ownership over his relation to work, his choice of vocation. The need to earn, to achieve a certain standard of living, drives most of us into employment situations that we would otherwise find tedious and uninteresting. In a world where complete and perpetual leisure was possible for everyone, how many of us would continue doing the work that we currently do?

In such a world, I would certainly re-balance my schedule to be able to do more of my "life's work" -- that is, to write and direct plays, to develop collaborative theater projects, to build a space for collective community performance and development. The amazing thing, however, is that I do all of those things now! Not from 9 to 5 (or on days like today, 9 to 9), but in my evenings and my weekends. I work a lot. I don't know about the latest reality shows on TLC because when I'm not working, I tend to be working. (Which is also part of the reason why I don't always find time to write on this blog.)

If I want to leave my current job, it's not because the fundamental things I love about it have changed at all; they haven't. It's rather that ingrained institutional structures have increasingly created obstacles that prevent me from regularly and most effectively carrying out the aspects of my job that I'm most committed to. I don't feel a lot of support from my immediate co-workers which can become exhuasting after a while. It's hard to be paddling your own boat when you're expeced to a certain degree to do everyone else's work for them, too.

If I leave my job, it will be to find the same job I am doing now, just a more purely realized form of it. There is a part of me that aches already as I contemplate leaving the tenants whom I've come to know and love and whose lives, it is impossible to deny, I have impacted hugely. For a significant number of them, I am the only person in the building that they feel they can have a human interaction with. The position bears a lot of weight. That feeling of connection is what keeps me there and it would be what I would have to find in anything else that I would do.

I think through things so much. I deliberate about most choices, at least the big ones. And yet, for as long as I can remember, I've eventually been happy with most of the major developments in my life, from where I've lived to what I've decided to do. I don't know if that satisfaction is a direct result of the degree to which I've thought through each situation or whether it has to do with some personality trait that inclines me more often than not towards acceptance. When things change in my life, it tends not to be because I need to do something new, but because the thing I'm doing has developed. What I've been doing has been just right for me, it's been perfect. And then it becomes time to do something more perfect.