This week—the days after Labor Day we are inclined toward a
last hurrah before the New Year begins. January may be the official start of a
new calendar, but for most of us, September is the psychological start of the New
Year. With this though comes a carryover from our earlier back-to-school preparations
bringing younger questions into our adult lives: Who do I want to be when I
grow up? Should I work harder this year? Or try to enjoy myself more? and
How do I balance all that I want? These
questions have a special resonance for people in recovery.
“Love and work,” Freud said, “are the twin capacities we
must resolve to achieve maturity.” Our
life’s challenge is in his words, and there is contradiction at the heart of
trying to sort that out. With love, our
task is to balance autonomy and intimacy: can I join with another person and
remain myself? Similarly, with work, we have to decide if it’s a delight or
punishment. It’s a Biblical dilemma: When Adam was banished from the Garden of
Eden his sentence was to labor all his days; that would suggest work as a bad
thing, but in Proverbs is the beautiful line, “Labore Est Orare”, to work is
to pray, signifying work as something holy.
This Labor Day it’s fair to consider how we can love our
work without sacrificing the rest of our life.
Some common advice from time management gurus tells us to
look at our life as a pie that we should slice up giving each piece a separate
place and weight and value. The good intention of this strategy is to protect
our time and psyche. But, after years of trying that I’ve come to disagree.
Most of the stress so many of us feels results from splitting ourselves into
these slices. What if, instead of carving up our lives, we could just be the
whole pie?
Years ago, I heard this described more eloquently by the
poet Mary Oliver. She advised us— graduate students who were worried about how
to make time for our writing--that we should not compartmentalize our lives.
Rather, she warned, “Your greatest loss of energy will come from trying to
change from one sensibility to another,” and that, “The poet can make supper;
the novel writer can drive through traffic, the writer of short stories can
feed the baby and let the poet make the speech.” Maybe there is a parallel for
our recovery as well? After all we know the admonition, “ We practice these
principles in all our affairs.”
Managing a busy, complicated life is the challenge of
everyone I know. Most of us are working and caring for family members—young
or old-- and studying something and seeking some kind of
spiritual life and having a good recovery life and trying to be an asset
to the greater community as well. The tension arises when we try to balance it
by holding those parts separate from each other—like those slices of pie.
Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Blessed is he who has found his work,
let him ask no other blessedness.” My prayer for all of us is to claim lives
filled with love and work as we celebrate, this New Year.
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