Tag: Work

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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“The symptoms of a manic modern world are real, but the diagnosis is wrong. We are not all working more, sleeping less and feeling more rushed,” lead researcher Jenevieve Treadwell wrote. “The core problem is our higher tempo of life.”

We know this. And yet the burnout epidemic is getting worse. We live at this “higher tempo,” because we are shamed if we fall behind, and praised for keeping up, even when it harms us. That’s how we came to believe our experience of stress is a necessary and noble sacrifice that humans make in service of the great and mighty economy, which matters more than the lives of us mere mortals. But burnout isn’t honourable, or inevitable. It is a wound. The sooner we recognise this, the sooner we can take steps to counter the damage…

Instead, we smile and we’re polite, because lashing out wouldn’t allow us to keep our jobs or stay safe. But that same stress response still happens in our bodies; instead of being spent, it just gets stuck. Modern-day stressors can include everything from body shame to white supremacy; we never get a chance to return to our baseline.

This adds up to constant increased strain on, for instance, our cardiovascular system, with no opportunity to heal the damage. Those injured places can develop plaques, which break loose and cause heart attacks. We are living in an upside-down world where stress itself is now more likely to kill us than the things that cause our stress. And we accept that this is normal and true.

—  Amelia Nagoski, In a world that glamorises stress, ‘burnout’ is a badge of honour. But there is a cure.  (The Guardian · April 6, 2023). Amelia Nagoski is the author of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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He picks up on three themes: first, that mastery is the “slow carpentering of fragments into a harmonious whole”. The expert creates the illusion of something unified by learning each tiny step – whether those steps are the small melodic ideas of a jazz pianist or the rhythmic pattern of a boxer’s jabs.

Second, mastery is about humanity, not perfection. “We never really love an artist’s virtuosity, or if we do, it feels empty,” Gopnik writes. “We love their vibrato, their … way of entangling their learned virtuosity within their unique vulnerability.”

Third, it’s not about “life rules, but real lives”. Gopnik thinks mastery can be found everywhere, from his mother’s kitchen to his driving teacher’s car. “We always overestimate the space between very good and uniquely good,” Gopnik says: we know the names of the Michael Jordans and the Leonardos, but there are countless people who are nearly, if not quite equally, brilliant. And even if most of us won’t become household names, “we are all more varied and capable than we are often allowed to seem”.

— Matthew Cantor, from “The Real Work: On The Mystery of Mastery” by Adam Gopnik book review – the art of expertise” (The Guardian, March 4, 2023)

Notes:

Sunday Morning

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Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book “The Sabbath”… has this line — “Six days a week we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self.” It’s amazing how much harder that is to do. But I can’t shake the question of, what if I did actually spend a full seventh of my life, which is what the Sabbath is supposed to be, living at a different speed? Who would I be if I knew more than how to work and not work? Who would I be if I knew actually how to rest?

— Ezra Klein, “Ezra Klein Interviews Judith Shulevitz.” The New York Times, January 3, 2023.

Guest Post: “Chores”

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Good morning. 

I asked David if he would post a guest entry from me on his blog. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my experience with so many of my virtual friends in a space and a community that inspires me. So here we go…

Chores by Haley Nahman inspired this. 

First, some background.

I have six months left on the right side of 50. This makes me Generation X. My Father is from the Silent Generation. My Mother is a Baby Boomer.  The Silents and the Boomers built this world we live in. They ground it out. They stood it up. They worked. And while their blood flows through me, my body, mind, and soul roam in a new era. The pace can’t be maintained. The planet can’t sustain it. It is time for a fine-tuning of the approach for our way forward. A re-setting so to speak. Everyone from all generations now needs to Learn, the learning that requires lots of unlearning to take place. That needs slowing down.

I took a two-year break from Social Media. It’s difficult to explain why, but I just had enough. There was too much mindless scrolling. It was very noisy.

And then, if that wasn’t enough, I quit a professionally fulfilling job in August, with a preeminent institution that I highly respect…I’m sure most would say, “Wow, impressive.” Hours were long (very). But, I loved the work. The pay was good. I was told that I was highly effective at a job I dreamed about — but…I needed to move on.

Team members (friends) continue to call to chat. They call to understand why I left.  Why? They call to ask what I’m doing now, so I explain.

“I’ve been walking to the grocery store daily to get what I need to cook dinner.” The work friend suggests: “Why don’t you plan for the week and go to the store once.”  It’s hard to explain to those of us on the treadmill, but I find joy in walking to the grocery store. I take the long way. I walk through alleys. I then meander up and down the aisles in the grocery store to find what inspires me. And then I walk home. All of this can best be explained as finding peace and joy that I had not felt in a long time.

‘Chores.’ English is not my first language. Ever since I started learning English, my brain registered chores as work people did not want to do.  It does not feel like a synonym for a task, errand, or something I need to do or would like to check off my list as I put my beautiful day together. 

Taking a sabbatical from Social Media in January of 2021, and then resigning from my job in August 2022, have enabled me to control how I spend my days. Because “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Annie Dillard said.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

  1. Just because I am good at something is not reason enough for me to do it for a living. And I acknowledge it is so hard to stop!
  2. I am a gas guzzler with low miles per gallon. Or an electric car. I need to make frequent stops for fuel. 
  3. To refuel or recharge, I need to disconnect FULLY.
  4. My center of gravity is not my work life. Toni Morrison said it best here in “The Work You Do, The Person You Are:”
    • Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
    • You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
    • Your real life is with us, your family.
  5. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

There was an ache akin to a pain only she who has breastfed knows. The ache a nursing mother feels when something stands between her and nurturing her infant, what matters the most. Work was the adult with a tight grip on my wrist, a little girl being dragged along, weaving in and out of oncoming traffic. I could not keep up. And it hurt. And I felt small. I felt a need to just stop to pull myself together.  So, I’ve traded long hours and a few bucks each year, and then I took those few bucks and invested in Me. Yet, I acknowledge the Grinders, building the rails that we ride, while others, me included, contribute in our own way, and watch the sunrise above the din.

The Pandemic slowed our world down. What got away as background noise, became loud and disturbing as everything else paused. It’s like my world was saying, “please, stop, get down on your knees at my eye level and pay attention to me.” I am still at its eye level paying attention, and I will be down here for some time.

Thank you,

Sawsan

DK: Note. This quote from Thich Nhat Hanh reminded me of Sawsan living his guidance: 

“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”



Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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SD: Your character has an interesting mix of appearing very powerful but also so very vulnerable.

CB: Yes. We’ve all got those dualities. We spend have of our lives in the middle of an confidence trick of pretending we’ve got our sh*t together, when in fact we don’t. The world and being alive is full of nuance and gray areas…

SD: Do you have self-doubt?

CB: Yes! Right now I’m full of it. Of course.

—  Cate Blanchett, on “Tar” and the Art of Transformation (CBS Sunday Morning, October 2, 2022

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