It’s been a long day

~ Live & Learn

What many discover is that the need to do, accomplish, and succeed perpetually replenishes itself. My father regarded lulls not as a grace but rather as enemies. His generational, class, and personal baggage was such that the only thing that mattered was Work (of the big W variety, not the small w work of cleaning up and tending to family life). Work was a form of mesmerism and ego refuge: best to keep going.

~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

Notes:

25 thoughts on “It’s been a long day”

  7. I have a beautiful friend who has had that attitude all her life. She is in the last stages of lung cancer, 50yrs young. No matter how encouraging I was, she kept working. “Best to keep going, she would say.” 😢

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  8. I was raised this way, to be an overachiever. No surprise, probably. But married twice to mellow men (after the first lunatic husband), I learned it’s ok to slow it down a bit. The world wouldn’t fall apart without my 24 hour participation. It’s actually amazingly refreshing to sit with no agenda whatsoever. I’ve found a good balance between activity and downtime. And since my partner of 25 years now is younger and still in his work groove, he’s happy to take on the financial responsibility. It took me a few years to stop fretting about this – I’d worked since I was 16. But oh, it’s lovely. It’s been the best thing, really. Wish I’d had that luxury when the girls were small, though at least I was home with them during the day, working restaurant nights until they were in Kindergarten. But all things is due course. ❤ Live & Learn, eh.

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  9. yes.
    Out of necessity the working long hard hours to ‘feed the family’ that’s one thing. But when, the Busy-ness of WORK becomes the reason to live, we have a problem. Enforcing that problem onto others escalates the issue.
    I wonder if others ever close their eyes and see their headstone captions…. would it say, “Great woman (or man)….. so Busy. All the time working.”
    No. Didn’t think so.

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    1. Yes Debi. That’s it. Your thoughts remind me of:

      One possible way to escape this unbearable state of uncertainty and the paralyzing feeling of one’s own insignificance is the very trait which became so prominent in Calvinism: the development of a frantic activity and a striving to do something. Activity in this sense assumes a compulsory quality: the individual has to be active in order to overcome his feeling of doubt and powerlessness. This kind of effort and activity is not the result of inner strength and self-confidence; it is a desperate escape from anxiety.

      ~ Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Open Road Media; Owl Book ed edition, March 26, 2013)

      And this:

      Western laziness ……consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy. We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. … in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.

      ~ Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of living and Dying (HarperSanFrancisco; June 26, 2012)

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  11. This mindset can only lead to illness – physical and spiritual. Sad. My mother used to allow us 1 or 2 “sick days” a year when we were young(er). How smart she was/is to give us mental health days. I’ll always remember that.

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