The last time I moved (three years ago, from one end of Medford to another), I hired two men to load the U-Haul truck. Good movers are amazing—they never stop moving, they understand exactly what shape everything is and where it can go, and they get big unarticulated solids (like a 7' tall, 4' wide one-piece oak bookcase) to go up stairs and around corners.
In comparison to that, Nora and I aren't being so productive today. We drove north yesterday afternoon, partly to say that we'd made progress on packing, but partly so we wouldn't have to inhabit the same couch and wastebasket full of tissues for another day.
We got in last night around 6, packed a couple of things, had dinner, and Nora fell asleep while I was reading to her. This morning, we were up about 7:45, puttered around some, went to the dump and the post office and the library. We took oddly delicate things (birds' nests, wasps' nests, and so on) down off the living room beams and Nora packed those away. She continued to fill and tape some boxes while I did some analysis on a data set I'd built for some colleagues; I sent that report back to Boston and carried Nora's packed boxes out into the garage while she talked on the phone to a friend. She laid down after a coughing spell while I replied to e-mails from some participants in last week's writing retreat, and she's now packing wicker and straw baskets while I write to you.
Perhaps if we muster the energy, we'll play a few hands of whist later in the afternoon before tea.
It's like living in a sanatorium, taking in the recuperative airs. And that feels enormously productive. We're appreciating each other, taking turns being solicitous of one another's aches, and allowing ourselves to be unpressured. It's a rare gift, unpressured-ness, one that we often throw away to grab just a little bit more pressure. We believe in Aesop's story about the ants and the grasshopper, and like him, believe that the happy grasshopper brought about his own deserved demise by not grinding endlessly away through the summer. Joy is suspect, effort is granted unreflective approval.
Americans take less vacation than other Western countries, provide fewer services to our fellow citizens, have greater income disparities and more stagnant workers' wages. On every objective measure, this endless pouring of ourselves into work is not helpful (except to a handful of people who reap all of the benefits of our manic over-investment).
Gosh, that paragraph was hard... and Etta James just came on the radio. I think I'll take a break.
Nora wrote not long ago about a piece by someone she knows, who talked about the addiction to work. That writer used the term carefully, having herself had other kinds of addiction issues. But she urged us to think carefully about why we work. Are we getting what we really want, or what we're supposed to want? Are we repeating old patterns of avoiding other problems, other family members, our own dissatisfactions? And, she notes, someone always profits from our addictions. The drug dealers and international brokers, the cigarette manufacturers, the distillers, the state lottery — their existence relies on misery. Who, she asks, profits from our addictions to work?
I have a second-hand acquaintance who worked as a USPS mail handler. He sucked up all the overtime he could, working 60 and 70 hour weeks on a regular basis. The time-and-a-half was a good deal. But his friends at the post office laughed at him. "The last two years of overtime is what bought me that boat!" he protested. And they laughed again, and asked how often he'd had that boat out this year... well, not so much, of course, because he was amassing more overtime.
The American workforce has moved into salaried positions in a huge way in the past thirty years, and at least some of that is because salaried pay dissolves the expectation of the forty-hour workweek. Someone profits from our over-investments in our work. Is it us?
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