Changing
Values
“Sometimes,
when we stop and reflect, we need to believe that the work we are doing has a
meaning beyond the tedium of the everyday. In fact, if we cannot see some
larger connection in what we are doing, we often experience a feeling of loss
or emptiness.”
Anne
Wilson Schaef (Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, Feb.1, Harper Collins,
1990)
One of
the consequences of being confined by this viral pandemic is doubt in almost everything
we took for granted. My friend, Dejuana, told me a story this week about an
on-line ordering debacle. She ordered a pair of children’s shoes for a young
friend. What arrived was a pair of black sneakers in an adult size. When she checked the shipping invoice, they had been ordered by someone in the
mid-west. She called the phone number on the form and spoke with a complete
stranger, telling her that her shoes were in Birmingham, AL, whereupon the lady
who’d ordered the sneakers told her that she had received a pair of black work
boots. Oh, my!
This is a product of our
poor, overworked, front-line workers who must be exhausted half to death after
a year of manic packing and shipping. Or maybe, since conspiracy theories are part
of the zeitgeist now, there is a giant rebellion at Amazon designed to mix everything
up just for giggles! Who knows? The point is that simple things we counted on
before are not so reliable anymore because everyone is stretched thin. This
doesn’t apply to everything, of course. It just feels that way because we have
the world under a microscope and we’re all living on a hair-trigger.
It’s a given
that we want our work to count for something—even when we are not in the middle
of a pandemic. The past year has taught us just how dependent we are on others—people we hardly noticed before, who are simply part of the
infrastructure that keeps the world operational. All the folks in the service
industries, for example. All the grocery check-out people, trash collectors and
delivery guys, not to mention our nurses and doctors and cleaning staff and
nursing assistants and cafeteria workers, and EMT’s and this list could go on
forever. We now know, and hopefully they know, just how crucial they are to the
smooth functioning of this country and the world. Who could have imagined that
yard signs would sprout up everywhere praising the UPS guys, or our postal
workers?
My
belief is that all work is meaningful and equal in importance. Some work takes
longer to prepare for—like medical school—but when it comes down to life,
sanitation workers are just as important. There is expertise in all fields of
work. A great sorter and deliverer of mail is just as valuable as the person
who writes the books they deliver. A great teacher of young children is as important
as a professor in the most prestigious university. Valuing all work is something
we have opened our eyes to in the past year—one of the few gifts of this
terrible pandemic. And we need all the gifts we can get, don’t we? Know this—whatever
work you do is meaningful and necessary and appreciated.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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