A Brief Thanks for the Chance to Complain About Work
![M.P. Wolcott, photographer. Farmers and townspeople in center of town on Court Day, Compton [i.e. Campton], Ky. 1940 Sept. US LOC. No restrictions.](/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/LOC_ComptonKy1940.jpg)
The newsletter comes out today, and with client pressures, I feel the time crunch. But somehow I started to think about work, work levels, fit work, and my ancestors.
I advocate everyone having work that fits. I know that it is the best way to get the most out of someone, and that many of the problems that spiteful people believe are caused by personal failings are actually a result of being too big or small for the roles that society has foisted upon folks. So many of us don’t have work that fits, work that builds us up by fully using our gifts and capacities.
I also remember my grandfather.
When my grandfather died, he had read more and more widely than any other person I have met. Yet he never finished the ninth grade, being forced to go to work in the West Virginia coal mines when his father died in a cave-in. He worked the mines until his twenties, when he apprenticed as a butcher in the coal camp store through some stroke of luck. It was the Depression and butchers got to eat the meat scraps. He worked hard all his life at jobs to small for him, but he saw that his son got to college.
His grandfather had come to West Virginia as a 6-yr old boy, crossing the mountains as an indentured servant to a group going west. They got as far as “Devil” Anse Hatfield’s place on the Tug River and he was close to death from an illness. Hatfield took him in as their houseboy, and he survived to help end the Hatfield-McCoy feud years later.
These aren’t higher work level jobs. But it was all that they could get.
As bad as things may be for you, the West has enough abundance that you have a chance to make a worklife for yourself that fits. My ancestors never had the opportunities that you have. Their capacity went mostly unused because it so far outstripped the need.
Do the work to get work that fits. Don’t give up. You have a lot to offer and many people fought for your right to be something different than where you were born. You don’t have to take a job that doesn’t fit. It will take a great deal of effort, and courage, but you have the chance.
Your grandfather’s story (wow Hatfields and McCoys) made me think of my own grandfather. He lived through the Russian Revolution and came to Canada in 1921. He was a philosophy professor in the old country but worked here as a janitor until he retired.
Thanks for this encouraging post.
“Do the work to get work that fits.”
How do I figure out which work fits me best. In every job I’m carving for another opportunity, another type of job, another way of life.
Which questions do I have to ask, and how can I, in my monologue interière, respond to them without projecting my feelings, my wishes, my future utopia. we see what we like to see, how can we learn to see what really is?
sincerely yours
It’s a good question. You’ll always be projecting. Everyone always does it: it’s part of imagining what someone else would do.
You’ve got the right question: figuring out which work fits you best. It’s a longish answer but still something you can know.
The real question though is why you ask this question and others do not.
I’ll address this, because it’s worth looking at.