> CD #123: Work that is real

Hello hello!

It’s been a month since I last posted (I guess this is a monthly newsletter now?), and I am on another book-related trip, this time to Whitehorse, Yukon. I’ve never been to the North before, but I’m quite excited to visit a part of Canada that has always had a mythological hold on my mind. I’m sure I’ll find that it’s not exactly what I imagine — places rarely exist as advertised — but I’m looking forward to having my assumptions overwritten.

April was a blur. Between my day job, mom life, book promo, and taxes, it all just kind of happened, and I’m coming out the other end a little bewildered. I am happy to report that All Our Ordinary Stories is up for some awards, which is nice, but also sort of unnerving.

The real highlight of the month was seeing my 14-year-old dressed up in my clothes for the citywide science fair competition (she wanted to look professional).

Many parenting milestones are well documented in our culture: first words, first steps, the first day of school… but nothing prepared me for the swell of pride I felt looking at my child, the baby I’d birthed and fed and nurtured, standing there in front of me, rocking a black blazer and dress pants like it was her first day on the job as a corporate accountant. Seriously, my heart could hardly take it.

Now a good four inches taller than me, my daughter looked better in my clothes than I ever have. And in that moment, my overwhelming hope was that she would continue to surpass me in every way possible.

Not that I need her to win awards (although she did at the science fair). What I want is for her to reach her full potential, become fully herself. And that she’ll find the things that she loves doing way earlier in life than I did so that she can enjoy the glow of accomplishment for much longer.

When I say accomplishment, I’m using Adam Gopnik’s definition from his latest book, All That Happiness Is, where he makes a distinction between “self-advantaging achievements” vs. “self-emancipating accomplishments.”

He writes:

“By accomplishment I mean the engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the rush of fulfilment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves. It stands in contrast to the more familiar, more legible achievement, which I would define as the completion of a task imposed from outside—the reward often being a path to the next achievement.”

And then later on:

Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self, and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.

Chasing achievement, Gopnik says, ultimately leaves you empty because it implies that there is only one way to have a happy life: just do all the steps correctly and you will “win.” But winners are rarely happy for long because there is always something else to chase after. Whereas cultivating a sense of accomplishment — even in something as small as learning a new chord on the guitar — ultimately frees us from focusing too much on “me, me, me” and, in doing so, brings us closer to what we are meant to be.

Did I write all this to convince myself that, when I lose out on an award, it won’t really matter? Possibly. But I also know from experience that nothing feels as good as the act of doing meaningful work, and award nominations, while flattering, are beside the point.

One of my favourite poems, by Marge Piercy, says it so well:

To be of use

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

:) Teresa

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