It is our common belief that work, if viewed attitudinally, from its healthiest perspective, is “An opportunity to exchange love and service”.
When I get wrapped around the axel, without this guiding belief, the following is what happens…expressed in the quotes of the immortal George Elliot:
I get co-dependently anxious about what other people think and begin to people please:
“Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”
Or, on the other extreme, I become ferociously narcissistic:
“There's no sort of work," said Caleb, with fervor, putting out his hand and moving it up and down to mark his emphasis, "that could ever be done well, if you minded what fools say. ”
I can get desperate, lose any love in my heart, put blinders on…as my human need for financially safety is apparently not being met:
“I must do as other men do, and think what will please the world and bring in money;”
I can deal with this unmet need with sarcasm (that actual root of which means to “tear flesh”)
“obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for my salad oil.
Or I could become bitter and envious:
“and I think there is nothing more contemptible than such imbecile gentility.”
And possibly end up in a snakepit of resentment:
“But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: ”
I can idealize work and imbue it with shining qualities the are illusory:
“There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow”
Or:
“to try his fortune, as many other young men were obliged to do whose only capital was in their brains.”
I can undisciplinedly dabble in Lotto-esque fantasies to relieve the pain:
“thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.
“there is no escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests, its horse-dealer's desire to make bad work pass for good, its seeking for function which ought to be another's, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity.”
I can get ridiculously hopeful and “Think like a child”…or at least an adolescent:
“I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich.”
Or:
“Other men have managed to win an honorable position for themselves without family or money.”
Or…I can just stop and say “This is a mess”,
Throw it to the ground and make a “positive mental statement”
hereafter cautiously called “a prayer”.
Something like this:
“In the mathematically unlikely event, that there is even the remotest possibility, that there may be something smarter than me in the Universe, and the even more ludicrous possibility that said entity could heretofore, care about me I am willing to try to look at work as an “opportunity to exchange love and service”
Just for today…
And see what happens
Just for today…three hours at a time
Steve D.
Why pray, be sexually abstemious, exercise, make money?
It makes me strong