Celebrating Work

Several days ago I visited a 90 year old friend who is suffering from cancer and a stroke.  As I entered his room, he was sitting in a wheel chair, a frozen and, to my mind, horrified look on his face.  After saying hi and kissing him, I asked:

“You’re not reading are you?”

“No.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“About what?”

“Chapter 15.”  It was the chapter he had been working on before the stroke.

I thought the exchange captured the essence of Daniel’s life.  As social and charismatic as he has been, his primary focus is always on his work.  It has occupied and nurtured him, bringing him equal measures of challenge, comfort, passion, and just plain engagement. He is an unapologetic working man, dedicated to his craft and, no matter how others judge him, content with his lot.

I have another friend, named Rebecca, who is consistently animated by working.  A few years ago she left her secure university position and simply continued her research and writing—minus the committees and the departmental squabbles.  When she isn’t absorbed in her writing, Rebecca gardens, which she does with much the same seriousness and total engagement that she brings to her research.  Gardening is work for her, and that’s a very good thing.  Rebecca tells me that she’s always been this way and sees no reason her focus on work should ever end.

I think that work has gotten a bad rap in our culture.  When we picture very hard workers, we imagine “workaholics,” people who are addicted, people who can’t help what they do, people who avoid family and friends.  They are said to be limited, stunted. Their husbands and wives often feel abandoned and comfort themselves by making fun of their “obsessed” spouses.  Listeners sympathize.  They understand how much the “workaholic” is missing in life.

Long ago, Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the cornerstones of the good life.  Without one or both, we would be alienated from our basic needs and drives.  Work, itself, isn’t a problem.  It’s when we work long hours in ways that fail to engage us.  Karl Marx called this “alienated labor,”  that is work that without meaning, which distances us from our true selves.  Many of us, for instance, work long hours without relish because we fear being fired or worry about failure and humiliation.

At this point, you might want to make a class distinction.  To be sure, many millions of people work under terrible conditions, seeking only the means of food and shelter; and  they would avoid this kind of work if they could.  It would be arrogant and misguided to speak for them.  But move just a rung or two up the economic ladder and there’s a difference.  Farmers traditionally hold fast to their work, with all of its vast variety.  We all know plumbers, carpenters, and mechanics who find their work sustaining.  The appliance repairman, who came to fix our stove a couple of weeks ago agreed:  “I was just on vacation for a week, sitting around.  I couldn’t wait to get back to work.  I love fixing things.”  Today, my barber, unbidden, went on and on about how much she loves her work.  “How about your colleagues,”  I asked.  “Most of them do, too, she responded.  “It’s just a great way to spend our time.”

I think that work has gotten a particularly bad rap for retired people.  The objection to work follows two lines of reasoning.  First, those who continue working demonstrate the workaholic gene—or germ.  They are addicts who can’t make a ‘healthy’ shift.  Second, retirees who continue to work are actually resisting rest, relaxation, and freedom because their identity is so completely wrapped up in their professional roles.

Yet all the people that I know who are of retirement age and still working, either in old jobs or new engagements, seem particularly pleased with their lives.

Lately, I’ve been reading a memoir by the poet, Donald Hall, age 89, and still working with energy and pleasure.  The book is called Life Work.  In part, the book is an homage to the farmer’s life lived by his grandparents.  He is at pains to show us how his life as a poet is not so different.

Years ago, Hall quit a tenured and well paid professorship at the University of Michigan to move to his ancestral home in rural New Hampshire.  He had liked teaching well enough but it took him from his greater love, writing.  The transition represented risks.  How would he support himself?  How would he respond to the isolation of small town life?  But the promise was greater than the risk: to spend hour after hour totally absorbed in his writing.  Absorption, energy, and enthusiasm are his measures of the good life.  Each morning, as he awakens, for instance, he can’t wait to get lost in his writing.  He will be hardly aware of the passing hours.  That is the sign of success.

Hall works in a state of he calls “absorbedness,” which is a close cousin to Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “flow.”  Flow is achieved when you are totally focused on a task, usually a task that requires you to extend yourself beyond your regular capacity.  The activity demands your full attention.  There are no distractions, no thoughts of what else you might do, what you might have done, what you should be doing.  Your mind is quiet.

Hall summarizes this state of mind in describing his wife, Jane Kenyon, a fellow poet.  “Her garden,” he tells us, “is work because it is a devotion undertaken with passion and conviction; because it absorbs her; because it is a task or unrelenting quest which cannot be satisfied.”

I have friends whose engagement with work echoes and amplifies Hall’s commitment.  One friend, a highly successful doctor and hospital administrator, retired early, partly because of the anxiety of so much responsibility, partly because of the constant static in his mind.  At first, Stephen simply relaxed, read, ran, saw friends—and distanced himself from responsibility.  Within a few years, though, he began to organize his reading, then to write and publish it in increasing profusion.

By my lights, he is back to work–without the anxiety that had plagued him for years.  Why?  I think it’s because the new work has been so freely chosen that he is not distracted by thoughts of failure, particularly thoughts of failing others.  Stephen seems to have found a late life calling.  A calling is a sense that the work almost chooses you; and when you are free to accept, even embrace the call, your mind is quiet.

I have another friend, Manny, who for more than 40 years, helped to build and manage a school for highly troubled children. It was good work that, for six or seven hours each day, fully occupied his attention.  In retirement, he has been able to extend the disciplines—Tai Chi, Meditation, prayer, exercise—that have been his passion for 50 years.  Now he pursues them for many hours each day, unencumbered by the boundaries of family and occupational life.  You might say that he has continued to work.  But this might be even more fulfilling.  Unlike the work he had done with the school, he is not pulled and tugged in many directions.  He is like the Zen Roshi:  When he eats an apple, his disciple tells us, he is only eating an apple.

My friend, Gary, was a businessman, who had his successes and failures, but labored in for decades but without fulfillment.  He was rarely able to bring the best of himself to the job.  He was often aggravated and anxious, and rarely at peace.  Retirement brought relief.  For a while Gary luxuriated in the freedom from work.  But with time, freedom from is being replaced with freedom to pursue his true love, music.  It is there that he can immerse himself and lose himself, or, in Hall’s terms, where he achieves a state of “absorbedness.”  Yes, Gary is retired, but he’s also working again, and that feels sweet this time around.

I know that my homage to work fails the subtlety test. I’m such an advocate.  But I really do think that work has gotten a bad name, especially for retired people, who are supposed to take advantage of the freedom they have earned.  They have, indeed, earned the right to relax, to putter—and, if they have the resources, to work as much or as little as they choose.  They are also free to work and work hard, which I am convinced is good for the soul.

Committed and absorbing work feels good, period, and when conducted in the service of a good cause, it feels even better.  Work is best when it is freely chosen and highly challenging, and even better when it feels like a calling.  When optimally engaging, work displaces the internal chatter and judgment about how much better a person you should or could be.  It quiets the mind.  Productivity and a quiet mind.  That works for me.

Transformative Moments: the Puritans Had it Right

There’s a question I have been wrestling with for at least fifty years: what makes change, particularly deep and transforming change, possible.  I don’t mean learning to be more polite, for example, but learning to express heartfelt gratitude to another.  I mean learning that shifts the underpinnings, the foundations, not the surface.

You can only prepare yourself for this kind of change.  You can’t force it.  Let me tell you a story about the early Puritans that illustrates my meaning.  The Puritans came to this country in the seventeenth century in pursuit of religious freedom.  They believed that the fate of their souls was predestined—in God’s hands alone.  Nothing they could do would influence the decision.  This created tremendous tension in these industrious people, who badly wanted to achieve God’s grace through good works.  In fact, some rebelled and created what they called a Doctrine of Works, which claimed that enough charitable actions would lead you to heaven’s door.  The Doctrine of Works provided solace for some but not for the strictest among them.

That little band believed they could, at best, prepare for grace by living simple, humble, and charitable lives.  Then they could only hope and wait.  And here’s the most interesting part of their approach to grace: It only came with heartbreak—the loss of a loved one or a home being burned to the ground, undoing years of backbreaking toil.  It’s as though the shell they constructed to protect themselves from life’s harsh injuries had to be cracked in order for God to enter.  If you substitute love or strength or understanding—more modern pursuits—for God, then you’ll see what I find so compelling in the Puritans’ pursuit.  Crisis tends to precede change and make it possible.

The lifetime of preparation, the striving for simplicity and humility, might take years to perfect, and even then there would be no guarantee of grace, but, once it came, it was sudden and complete.  You were transformed, and everywhere you looked, things were brighter, clearer, more connected.  The timing and content of change were unpredictable but durable.  The element of crisis was key to the journey.

Since I began publishing the essays in my blog, I have received a good deal of kidding and concern from friends about the dark side that I’ve revealed.  I appreciate their concern but I want them also to pay attention to something I am striving for: a kind of clarity and light that only comes with the acknowledgement, even the re-experience, of heartbreak.  Like the Puritans, I believe that it is necessary to move through times of confusion and instability to change the underpinnings of my mind.

The Puritans and I are not alone.  Virtually all contemporary change theorists sing a similar tune.  Here I think of Ilya Prigogine in physics, Steven Jay Gould in evolutionary biology, Eleanor Duckworth in education, and many more.  Let me escort you on a little journey through their world.

Prigogine says that systems in disequilibrium are vulnerable to change, often precipitated by random events.  When it comes, change can be sudden, massive, and complete.  The heartbreak of the Puritan is a kind of disequilibrium.  Most of us know these moments, when we are confused, off balance and uncertain, when the way we have solved problems and coped with pain in the past no longer work.  We reach and grasp for the ways that once worked but they seem to have abandoned us.  When we cannot recover our balance or our clarity, when we will ourselves to see the crisis out, eyes open, then deep learning is possible.

We find ways to see our world that had been invisible before, and new vision leads to new action.  Where once it had been unthinkable to confront an abusive boss, you “know” that you can do it—and you do it.  Where once you felt chained to a job or a relationship, you see the way out—or the way in, towards renewal. Where once you could not see beyond the death of your husband or wife, you might see the possibility of new friendships and professional pursuits.  You see these alternatives not because you are straining to do so; they are simply present.  These are transformational moments.

Steven Jay Gould developed a similar notion, which he called punctuated equilibrium.  He argued that it is only when species wander far from their normal environment that they are likely to mutate, creating new species. This, he tells us, is the engine of evolution.  So it is with our intellectual and social lives.  When we are placed—or place ourselves—in unaccustomed, often uncomfortable environments, we adapt.  We adapt in order to survive.  In this process of adaptation, we act and understand the world differently.

Eleanor Duckworth, a pioneering educator, famously said, “To be confused is good. Glorify confusion!”  She encouraged learners to experience cognitive conflicts, even painful ones, which, she believed, led to their minds becoming more deeply engaged with problems they were trying to solve.  She was less interested in students finding the right answers than in trusting the process of exploration, then testing conclusions—new ways of seeing—in light of how well they held up in experience.

In 1995, in my attempt to help individuals, couples, and families change, I developed a theory of my own.  It seemed to me that people change when they are ready to change. Trying to change people who are not ready was like trying to push a Suma wrestler off his spot when he knows you’re coming.  But when people are ready, when they are confused, off balance, and frightened, they could be changed with a little push from behind.  The push represented a kind of emotional judo, in which the therapist makes use of the patients’ own momentum.  Instead of forcing the matter, I would often wait for a moment of readiness, then provide a very safe environment, and encourage people to come up with innovations of their own.  It worked, and I often wished that I had someone to help me in that way.

This year, I turned seventy-four, I retired from my professional life and left a very nurturing work community.  For a year or so, when people asked what I was going to do with retirement, I said that I didn’t know.  The passage was cloudy, and I couldn’t see to the other side.  I was willing to not know because I did know that uncertainty had often had such a powerful and positive impact on my life.  The results have been extraordinary.

For the last six months, my mind has been more fertile than ever, my ability to write has been unblocked, my wish to tear down barriers between myself and others has surprised me.  When I look at issues that interest me, I see them as though from the height of the highest tree.  Ask me about any given political challenge and I remember things that people have tried sixty, fifty, thirty, and ten years ago.  History feels present, a familiar landscape.  The same is true for literature and music.  I feel like I am living in an expanded world, whose full availability feels new to me.

I also feel free.  I seem to have frequent access to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, being in the zone, being utterly absorbed in and energized by writing.   I wonder sometimes whether—or when—this will wear off.  I have no wish to flee, no wish to get back to “normal,” no wish to relax into golf, movies, vacations, and bon bons in bed..  And I’m going to milk this for as long as I can.  Then, when the next crisis comes, as it will,  I can only hope, that I’ll have the courage to work through another time of confusion and difficulty in order to celebrate  what’s on the other side.

 

Happiness or Engagement: What do you Choose

I began writing in my journal forty-five years ago when my daughter was born.  For much of each day, I was seeing couples in therapy, teaching young therapists, and taking care of Jessie.  I loved each of the activities but longed for a moment of quiet, a time when no one was asking anything of me.  So I began to wake at 5:00, one full hour before Jessie got up, in order to peacefully reflect on life.

I always wrote in the same notebook with the same pen, sitting the same easy chair.  A ritual emerged.  Within a few months, the ritual almost automatically quieted my mind.  It was like entering a trance, almost sensual in its calm.  The calm would build, peak and wane, and for the longest time, I tried to lengthen its stay.  I couldn’t, and eventually I found a way to let the quiet go.  I accepted its momentary quality.  Both the quiet and the release of the moment are true to this day.

When I was building my house in New Hampshire, I would work long hours, oblivious of time—the absorption was so complete. These days, when I am playing handball with my grandson, walking and talking with Franny on a sunny day, or deep in conversation with a friend, preferably over drinks, I feel something of that absorption.  Time almost stops.  Nothing else enters my mind.  I love these feelings.

There are other experiences that are not so welcome: the nine months, for example, when the organization I led seemed on the edge of failure and dissolution.  It was terrifying. My team and I worked around the clock, with extraordinary focus, staving off panic, and doing some of our best work.  As we emerged from the darkness, we looked at each other with a powerful affection and respect.  Ultimately, this was a good time.

For decades, America has been entranced with the idea of happiness, not absorption, not focused engagement.  Happiness represents one of our great industries.  Books, advice columns, and infomercials tell us the six, eight, or ten keys to happiness.  Positive psychologists tell us that we can train ourselves and achieve unerring results.  If we are not happy, there is something wrong with us.  We are told to take anti-depressants and to seek psychotherapy—or to address the catalogue of our inadequacies.  Maybe we haven’t tried hard enough, haven’t achieved enough, haven’t found the right person, the right job, the right place to live or vacation.  If we’re not happy, we need to keep searching as though we were Ponce de Leon in pursuit of the Fountain of Youth.

I have also have fallen hard to the enchanted promise of happiness, trying in a hundred different ways to get to that holy land.  I have meditated for forty-five years, hoping to rise above my negative feelings.  I have been in therapy and I have taken fabulous vacations.  I have had a great family, wonderful friends, terrific work.

In spite of these efforts, I find happiness chimerical.  The harder I try, the more I’m disappointed.  I am not alone.  As Ruth Whippman, author of a new book, America the Anxious, puts it, “Paradoxically, the more people were encouraged to value happiness as a separate life goal, the less happy they were.”  Victor Frankl concurs:  “It is the single minded pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”

In my experience, the emphasis on happiness as an end in itself also steers us in unproductive directions.  It almost inevitably leads inward.  We constantly check our emotional pulse.  Are we happy?  Happy enough?  Are other people happier?  What’s their secret?  We seek quick fixes in food, movies, and drugs.  They are not sustaining.  Ultimately, the search, itself, makes us self conscious and anxious.

What’s more, the search leads in a self-centered direction.  “I want to be happy” is entirely different from “I want to make life better for others,” Or “I want to serve my country.”  Or “I want to do a really good job.”  Trying to lead a happy life, psychologists have found, is associated with being a “taker” while seeking a meaningful life aligns with being a “giver.”   “Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life,” they write, “in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided.”

When fully engaged, we lose ourselves.  We become totally absorbed in a task, in achieving goals, in teamwork.  Mihaly Csikszentmihali has written eloquently about “the psychology of optimal experience,” which he calls “flow.”  Athletes call the experience “being in the zone.”  A basketball player in the zone shoots the ball with complete commitment and certainty.  It will go in.  Artists, writers, tradesmen, and leaders at their best, regularly enter the zone.  It is most likely to occur when you are stretched and totally absorbed, totally concentrated on achieving a goal.  When you are in the zone, you are “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”  The feeling is almost ecstatic.

There is a parental mantra that has grown stronger over the last several decades: “I don’t care what my child does so long has s/he is happy.”  This has never been my mantra.  I used to say that I want my children to feel loved so that they were capable of loving others.  The focus is on the other.  I wanted them to believe that they can do what they put their mind to do so they can serve whatever purpose they find in life, and to serve with enough concentration that that their energy flows freely.  I believe that these two capabilities, love and confidence lead to fulfillment, which I treasure above happiness—and will lead often enough to happiness.  As the psychologist, Daniel Gilbert says, “happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live.”

Over the years, as I become engrossed in my journal writing, reaching a new understanding of some feeling or idea, I often enough grow calm, so calm it seems that I am giddy and I laugh aloud.  Then the feeling wanes and I let it go.  The visit to happiness has been a good one, and I am satisfied.