Labor

This morning I had my Sunday ritual of coffee, a bagel, a few moments reading, & reviewing my yoga class plan before going to teach my weekly Sunday morning class.  On my way to the coffee shop I heard a few minutes of Krista Tippett's On Being, which is always a bonus of waking early on Sundays.  She was airing an interview with Mike Rose.  I was so happy to hear his voice again.  I'd heard him interviewed previously on a different NPR program after the release of a prior book.  His work largely examines & reaffirms the intelligence in various types of work.  He traces historically emphasis placed on intellectual work & this myth of physical work connoting a mental dimness.  During the interview he mentioned even in ancient Greece writing about physical work dulling the intellect.

Rose actually studied the processes farmers, construction workers, waitresses, cosmotologists, factory workers, & others use in their day to day functioning.  He also studied highly esteemed careers such as surgeons, lawyers, and engineers.  No matter the field he found that those who had a well-blended & utilized background in both study & real life experience rose to the top of their field.  & that contrary to common belief, whether articulated directly or implied through diminished recognition of vocational programs or slights in language, working-class work employs highly functioning & complicated mental processes.

My husband & I were really excited hearing this interview.  At the time my primary wage employment was waiting tables while he landscapes.  We'd long talked about the efficiency necessary for this type of work.  Every movement becomes economic & you constantly are retaining and reprioritizing information.  This was a confirmation of what we'd long thought, but never systematically studied.

It also resurfaced a memory I had as a child.  I was raised in an upper-middle-class household where the implicit messages were that I would study, attend a "good" college, and marry a well-to-do man where I would be a good conversationalist & entertain his bosses & partners.  Given that this was the never directly communicated, but implied path, I wasn't expected to do many (if any!) chores.  I wasn't expected to work a job.  However, given that I wasn't doing these things I felt an enormous dependency on others.  I wasn't comfortable with this.  I remember going to restaurants and diners, watching wait-staff move so quickly & purposefully, & feeling that I didn't have whatever they had.  I didn't have the common sense, nor clarity, to care for my space and environment.  It made me feel insecure.  My existence would be predicated on money I didn't earn & I wasn't entirely certain I would gain the skill-set to earn or do my share.

Eventually this became in equal parts a personal uneasiness & a political unwillingness to be unable to contribute in equal share to my consumption.  I first got a job at age 14 working at a Farmer's Market fruit & vegetable stand.  My co-workers were working class adults who woke up probably around 3 am, commuted from rural Pennsylvania, to the farmstand, & then put in a 9 hour day.  They had little patience for me.  Confirming my earlier fears, I had no common sense nor aptitude for this type of work.  I consistently had discrepancies in my cash till.

At age 19, the summer between first & second year of college, I found an internship at the Union of Legal Aid Attorneys.  This is a fantastic union of public defenders in New York.  At that time I was helping assemble a database of police brutality.  The attorneys constantly had clients coming in, obviously having been beaten severely.  We were assembling the badge numbers, injuries, dates, sites of arrest, and other information to develop a case against then Mayor Giuliani & the NYPD.  ULAA couldn't pay me, so I had a stipend from Mount Holyoke, and at nights I worked as a cashier at Integral Yoga Natural Foods.  Once again, every night my till was off.  I was always brutally honest at these jobs, but I had no sense.  I was making mistakes that caused my managers to have to perpetually stay late & account for my errors.

After some momentous shifts in my personal life & a new-found political consciousness, I decided I wanted to work full-time in grassroots, which by design is unpaid.  I would have to earn to cover my rent and expenses elsewhere.  I began waiting tables.  For at least six months I was horrendous.  Thankfully, at a certain point, I caught the rhythm, I developed my own short-hand, I learned how to move through a double almost the way a yogi meditates.  You just flow.  You waste no movement, no breath.

I waited tables full-time for about a decade. I liked work that kept me on my feet and in my body.  Rose went on to say in his conversation with Krista Tippett that work utilizing our highest intellect usually resides in equal parts in the physical body as well as our minds.  Strictly mental work is limited.  Work that integrates these various aspects of our being tends to stretch our conceptions and functioning.

I'm grateful for work.  I say that also being human and often resenting obligations.  However, I'm grateful for work that enables me to feel part of the whole.  I'm thankful to work in my body & now have the confidence that I can earn, contribute, support myself & my community.  I'm happy to know the value of various types of work.  I'm now hoping to learn more well-rounded work.  I work in my garden & get a better sense of the conversation with plants, soil, weather, & food.  I work in my body through the practice of yoga, running, swimming, & breathing.  I work at landscaping & again am in that first six month stage of feeling like an imbecile.  But learning nonetheless, & acknowledging the value of process.

& I'm thankful for unions, for people who value workers, for immigrants of today & generations before who followed resources & remind us that borders are ultimately arbitrary & that we owe one another respect & consideration.