Essential Work for Inessential Workers
The search for purpose when purpose seems lost
We call work one’s occupation. Millions of us are newly, suddenly unoccupied, with nowhere to go, nothing to do. At least five of my upcoming freelance jobs were canceled. Like Times Square, my calendar abruptly went from jam-packed to eerily barren.
The latest figures are that somewhere north of 30 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past six weeks or so. This loss of work is not just an economic crisis; it’s an existential one. A brick wall has arrested our forward motion.
We are not designed to be passive. We’re designed to form bricks and lay them down, make something where there was nothing, move the human project forward. Take work away, and pleasure loses its luster. Take work away, and existence itself becomes work — a constant, itchy quest for worth, purpose, and meaning.
Work is a slog. You have to drive to the place or sit in the chair, tap on the keyboard or carry the thing from here to there, check the clock or the word count to see how close you are to being done. Even when you’re doing work you fundamentally like, you mostly look forward to it being over.
But work also sets off the boundaries of pleasure and relaxation, making their small territory more vivid, more earned. It’s hard to enjoy being in a room you never leave, even if it’s stocked with mai tais. Work lets you leave the room of ease, enabling the enjoyment of returning to it.
Now I feel like I’m in the scene in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland where Alice is walking down a bright pink path through the dark forest, and here comes a dog with a broom for a snout from the opposite direction, brushing the path away. He erases the path before her, then behind her, then beneath her, until she finally sits down on a rock and weeps, terrified, lost, and alone.
Many of us — inessential, unoccupied — are now Alice weeping on the rock.
I’ve been reading essay after essay about why we should go easy on ourselves, let up on this self-imposed pressure to produce, to perform, to progress. We should settle into the moment, they say. Trust that we’re contributing simply by staying home, staying out of the way while the essential folks do their essential business. Get comfy, binge a show, bide your time, embrace your inessentialness.
I’ve tried this perspective on, but I can’t get it to fit. I can’t fool myself into feeling like passivity is action. I’m craving action. I’ve been volunteering and donating, but it’s not enough. I want to work. I want to lay down bricks, make something where there was nothing.
Because work is all tied up with survival. Literally, for many of us — if we don’t work, we don’t eat. And psychologically for even more of us — even for those with a safety net, letting go of work feels like letting go of the cliff’s edge, free-falling into oblivion. I imagine this is why retirement can be such a mixed bag, even for those with the privilege to be able to do so. For me, a week with no work stirs up big feelings of anxiety and groundlessness, a sense of having nowhere to plant my feet.
It has slowly started to dawn on me that this is the work: Learning the contours of my discomfort, watching my mind writhe and buck, seeing what I do when there’s nothing to be done. This is the work I’ve been handed, the assignment that came down from on high. It’s the inverse of the kind of work I prefer; succeeding at it means producing less. It means realizing that maybe the ground provided by abundant work was an illusion all along.
When Alice sits down on the rock, she reasons with herself through her tears: “When one is lost, I suppose it’s good advice to stay where you are until someone finds you. But who would ever think to look for me here?”
Maybe we can use this time to look for ourselves. To look at ourselves.
I’ve been going on long walks in the woods, and my gaze keeps gravitating to the fungi. Dotting fallen logs, forming elaborate terraces up the side of dead trees, pulling death down into the furnace of life.
This is the work that looks like the opposite of progress and expansion — slow, mostly invisible digestion, breaking down that which has expired, reclaiming the raw nutrients that will bloom in new ways on later days.
The truth is that I’ve long needed to do this work. Even when things are jamming, I have a hard time being fully present in any given gig or project. I’m always multitasking, trying to juggle three jobs at once, pitching this while executing that, pushing against the limits of the moment, pushing forward against the leading edge of my life.
Just beneath the surface of all that frenetic activity is a slowly circling fear — of scarcity, of stillness, of presence. What if I don’t have enough? Accomplish enough? What if I fall short of my potential by not seizing the moment? How can I trust the river to carry me if I stop paddling?
The early weeks of social distancing found me paddling harder than ever. I pitched and wrote articles, interviewed experts, reached out to old clients to see if I could be of use. But as my frantic attempts at staying busy kept failing (pitches were rejected; ongoing and prospective writing gigs dropped away), I felt more and more anxious. The big, scary thing circling beneath me in the water was getting closer, threatening to consume me. It wasn’t just about money, I knew that. I’ve got some savings, and there’s always unemployment insurance. So what was it?
As in a recurring nightmare, the only way to stop it is to finally face the monster you’ve been running from. So I’ve decided to turn around and look at it. What is it, the thing that keeps me pushing so ferociously forward all the time? What am I afraid will happen if I stop and occupy the moment that I’m in?
I might become invisible. I might realize no one needs or wants anything I have to offer. I might discover that I’m actually undeserving of love and approval. I might feel profoundly left out.
There’s more, I’m sure. I don’t expect this revelation to be quick or tidy — something I can vanquish simply by naming. This monster has layers, many heads, an ineffable heart.
My work now, and maybe yours too, is to be still. To walk and sit and see. To feel the uncertainty and the discomfort, the fear and judgment and impatience and frustration and anger and sadness, and hang out with the monster. It’s to dissolve my own suffering into raw compassion for the human condition, for all the other millions of people struggling with the exact same fears and feelings in their own way.
This is the work.
Fungi may look like individual mushrooms above ground, but beneath the surface they’re interwoven. They’re actually giant organisms, vast and unified, deeply interconnected with the network of life that mingles together underground. What a single mushroom digests feeds the whole ecosystem.
What you and I do with this time, the work we do on processing and transforming our own suffering into compassion and softness and kindness, could feed our communities in the same way — create raw ingredients of peace, presence, and resilience in our communal consciousness.
And just because it’s still, and mostly invisible, doesn’t make it passive. Bringing attention and presence to pain and uncertainty is hard work. Not opting for mere distraction or numbness is hard work. Noticing when and where and how we want to lash out in blame or anger to externalize our pain, and choosing to see that impulse clearly before (or while) giving in to it — that’s hard work.
Our essential workers are putting themselves on the line for the rest of us. This is essential work we can do in return, in the meantime. So that we have the ingredients to build something more vital and alive when the time for rebuilding comes — something more kind and abundant and connected.
I would like to emerge from this different from how I entered it — more able to be present in my life, better able to relax into groundlessness. And I would like to emerge into a different world than the one I left.
The old world we built is decaying, in and of and through all of us. We’re digesting it to transform it. We each have our own piece to process. Mine is all wrapped up in a value system that equates worth with productivity and attention with love. You probably have a hunch what yours is.
It isn’t easy. Last night I said to my husband, “I get frustrated that no matter how much mindfulness I bring to these thoughts and feelings, they still don’t stop.”
“Yes,” he said. “I think the idea is that eventually you get to a point where making them stop matters less.”
This is the work, for now.
All the original drawings accompanying this essay are by Lisa Mauer Elliott. Find her on Instagram at @earthskywaterlove
