Working Make Believe
Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 06:20PM It’s 4:34pm on January 31st. I spent the last eight hours working. Today, that work was outside, ice guiding. I know it was work because other people knew I did it, and I got paid for it. Yesterday, I spent the same eight hours in front of my computer. Nothing I did touched another person or was directly revenue producing. So was it work?
When I was four years old, I went to school to work. Other kids went to pre-school to play; I went to Montessori. There is no play in the Montessori cannon. Young children work—even if it looks the same as the kids at the regular pre-school down the street where they call it play. I stayed at Montessori until I was thirteen. Since I went to college, I’ve always said that that school, Lake Country, single-handedly created my work and study ethic. I always said it like it was a good thing.
But what if it just set me up for an unconventional adulthood, where “work” is never fully understood? If, as a kid, I could build bridges with blocks and be told I had done work, then what do I, as an adult, understand as the demarcation of that term in the outside world?
My boyfriend is also a climbing guide. But he does it full time. He’s worked twenty-five of the past thirty days. He gets up, leaves the house, and comes back with a paycheck. I’m usually well into my second cup of coffee when he leaves, and just nursing the final sips of my fourth cup of tea when he comes home. What I do does not look the same as what he does. If I track my hours, I spend roughly 80% of my time working without an immediate corollary of income.
Maria Montessori never talked about getting paid for work. She just wanted for children’s time to be valued. But when those kids grow up they enter a world where value, for work, comes in the form of money. Or at least money is the clearest sign of valuation.
I’m not talking about being zen about all of this—about realizing the other things “work” gives us. That is another subject. I’m talking about what happens at the end of the day when you close your computer screen and look around, and for all practical purposes to anyone in the outside world, nothing has changed since you opened the thing ten hours before. How do you know if it counts?
Maybe conventional work was developed so that people would have parameters for what they did every day. It’s a giant container in which you can fit the things you do that are outside of, well, non-work. Life is supposed to be divided like that—or it is if you follow the way many societies set up valuation. But that edge is blurring for most people. Mountain guides come home from a day of “work” and have to dry out their gear to get ready for the next. People you work with send you messages on facebook. Your neighbor ends up across the desk at a job interview. Email bleeds into every part of life.
Then again, maybe it’s just about how we contextualize it. Today, out on the ice, a man next to me was describing his job as a truck driver to his climbing partner. He gets up, drives to the depot station, gets in his truck, drives where he is told, parks his truck, gets in his car and goes home.
“It’s honest work,” he said. The other man nodded in agreement. They moved on to the next climb.
I went back to belaying my client. This was my job for the day—the thing these men were doing for play. My work. My sometimes work.
It’s honest work. That was that. Enough said. Maybe that’s what Maria Montessori meant, after all.
Reader Comments (9)
I have always maintained that the worst four letter word ends in a "K"...w-o-r-k. Avoid it as much as you can, instead make your passion produce your income, then you will never work a day in your life. I wonder what Maria Montessori would say about that.
Maria Montessori might have been living during a time when passion was a four letter word. But we are not.
Nice response Majka.
I need to stop reading your posts. The point/counterpoint on the balance of life and work resonates strongly. It is my demon also. At what point do the sacrifices from one side not produce equal or greater return on the other. The truly happy cultures were the 'hunter & gatherer' groups. Once food, shelter and security needs were met the rest of their time was spent with family, study, arts (culture) & crafts (sell/trade). Sounds nice right?
Last night I worked until 9 pm and was told that I needed to remember how to live life as well. Maybe we do need to go back to the hunter gatherer relationship. I think we can say, yes, it was balanced because the needs were met, and there was not an acknowledgment of other needs. But is that true? Humans kept evolving and that had to do with some level of striving for more.
Did we really keep evolving or was the H&G model only endangered because of increased population density? Thus a new model was needed as a response to this change. It is navel pondering with the benefit of much hindsight. Would also be an interesting anthro term paper.
So, division of labor (from agriculture to cubicles) created divisions within the selves of the laborers.
The Montessori premise: the whole child is the whole idea, does not mesh well with the specialized adult adult work world. It's difficult to answer the question, "Does who I am match what I do?" within a work society that is structured to distill the individual for the sake of the group.
This notion may be one of many deeply rooted causes for "happy hour."
There are always the same questions, not matter how we fight them. Wait... that needs more, and suddenly I'm writing another Blog. Does that count as work? Is that another conversation? http://www.majkaburhardt.com/liminal-line-blog/?SSScrollPosition=0
nice post and cool responses :D
loveisintheair