Regarding work and ways of working, there are certain stock phrases that populate my mind readily. ‘Don’t make extra work for yourself’. ‘Work smarter, not harder’. I don’t know when or where I absorbed these nostrums, but they are so second nature by now I hardly think of them. They can all be boiled down to: reduce friction, increase (pleasure, profit, gain, etc.)
For the longest time I did not doubt these sayings. But these days I find myself oddly wanting to reverse them. I want to work harder, not smarter. I do want to make extra work for myself. It sounds scandalous to admit, because this is heresy to the American work ethic — an ethic that celebrates efficiency and effectiveness. We pride ourselves in getting stuff done, and we venerate those who seem to get a lot done. How else do you get a lot done than by being extremely useful?
I have seen, first hand, how touchy we can be on this account. At a wedding a while back, my wife and I sat at a table with a group of strangers. Over dinner, the man across from me asked what I did, and I said, trying to make light of that routine opener: Nothing. The poor man nearly choked on his steak. The table fell quiet. A ghastly expression stole over his face. It was like telling someone you skin cats for a hobby. My wife overheard this and quickly chided me for my bad taste. But either way, the point was made. I had touched a nerve.
As a culture, we are very anxious about being efficient. More accurately, we are very anxious about being found inefficient. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with doing something better, cheaper, swifter than before. But the older I get the more I worry about taking this instinct too far. And by too far I mean too automatically — when the faster way, or smarter way, seems like the only way.
One of the reasons for my reservation is how much I relish the mundane stretches of my day. Many of these stretches include pesky tasks that I do just because. In the afternoons I have a list of household chores I chip at daily. It includes vacuuming, dishes, taking out the recycling, laundry, returning library books and other sorts of ho hum errands that would make you yawn if I listed them out. These are not pressing assignments. They are not lucrative. They do not advance my career, make me a more curious or intelligent person. Most of them are not very important at all.
And yet I find simple pleasure in doing them. Not the same sort of pleasure gardeners receive pruning zinnias, or bakers from flouring their hands and kneading dough. This kind of work is not an avocation. But to the extent that it encourages an innocent kind of self forgetfulness, I find it invaluable. It affords a baseline experience of being. It reminds me of my smallness, my creaturehood. It adds rhythm, embodiment. It lightens that cumbersome sense of self importance that we carry on our shoulders incessantly. It dethrones the insatiable desire to get to the end of something.
Mundane work like this, that we undertake without hope of reward, is crucial. Many days it reminds me of my late grandfather. One of the things I loved about him was how he used to go around the house doing things. Puttering, we called it. Making chores. Doing things he didn’t need to do, but did anyway because he liked it and because it kept his mind sharp and because he’s a person.
Another fitting example comes from the book Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in which the author tells the story of a man sailing around the world solo. In order to keep himself sane through many long, monotonous passages at sea, the sailor learned to make work for himself. When his eggs were going bad, instead of dumping them overboard, he would break them over his deck and let them bake in the sun. He did this so that he had something to clean later. The chore was not merely a chore; it was a relief; it was a godsend.
I’m not in favor of dilettantism; for swimming through the hours doing whatever feels right in the moment. Au contrare. I’m all for squeezing the juice out of a day. For putting first things first. I’m one of those people who thoroughly enjoy self-help productivity books. I love tinkering with my schedule and trying to engineer an optimal routine for the day. But sometimes it gets to be too much. The efficiency instinct kicks in and we find ourselves, by habit more than choice, serving the schedule, not the other way around. When that happens it’s easy to overlook meaningful things in unlikely places.
Too often we conflate mundane with meaningless, and small with insignificant. In my experience, the miracle of mundane work is that it is anything but meaningless. And smallness is not proof of insignificance, but a test of it. How alive we are at any moment may be measured not only by the grandeur of our vision, but by its minuteness — how deep past the surface of our lives, down to the fine roots, can we find something to wonder at, to be content with.
As the poet Horace put it: ‘it is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion.’ Making a little friction can help do that. Humble work can humble us. Quite literally, it can bring us down to earth — tug us out of the smokescreen of thoughts and put us in touch with something real. It can remind us that we are here, living, being in the world — even for a short time.
show & tell 