20140829.0623

As it turns out, I did not much enjoy my day resting yesterday. This is not because of anything bad that happened; it is because I rested. I was not about the business I should have been about, instead drifting through a have of mind-numbed...something...I cannot clearly remember at this point. I had not my usual focus and discipline, feeble as they are, and their lack grated upon me. At the end of the day, I looked back upon it and was not pleased with what I saw--a shiftless, formless mass of time (with the occasional glimmer of playing with Ms. 8, so there was some value to it).

What that annoyance suggests about me is, perhaps, telling of my acculturation. Having grown up with hardworking parents, I habitually associate adulthood with work so that not working feels to me a sort of regression to childhood--and I did not enjoy being a child. Having been a graduate student and now working as a (contingent) professor, I habitually associate being busy with having some (entirely too thin and scanty) justification for my continued existence and the paychecks that support it (one of which came today, to my joy). Having lived in the United States for all my life and as a member of the working and middle classes, I am embedded in the lingering Puritan form of the Protestant work ethic that vitiates against idleness in all forms and circumstances. Such quips as "You don't feel any better lying around, so get to work" and "Go ahead, rest; it'll be good practice for the unemployment line" (as though that is an idle situation) ring in my ears unbidden. They join the myriad other little bits of wisdom that tell me I should be working; I should never not be working, and I have to confess that, at some level, I agree with them. For of what value am I if I am not creating value (even if what I and others call "value" differ)?

Another part of me, less strong and less loud, rails against such an idea, of course. (I am trained in the academic humanities, after all.) It cries out that we are not meant only to "create value," to produce the results of the work of hands and mind. It says that we do the work to be able to enjoy the results of it, and so taking time to do so is worthy and appropriate. Yet another, somewhat louder and with more certainty, says that the work is done better by a healthy worker, so that a day to rest and recover is in order so that the work may be returned to with vigor and rigor--and, in a nod to the other, enjoying the results of work well done is easier in health than in sickness; the other agrees. Yet both know, and their composite that is my narrative voice knows that such arguments carry a teacup or a bucket against the mighty tide of prevailing standards. However much the teacup might be preferred from which to drink and the bucket from which to make use, the tide is what shapes the land.