Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.12

Labor not as one who is wretched, nor yet as one who would be pitied or admired; but direct your will to one thing only—to put yourself in motion and to check yourself, as the social reason requires.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9.12 (tr Long)

Observe how often “work” is a dirty word. There is a perfectly good reason for this, if we only consider it as something that someone else wants us to do, or as a means to making money and acquiring status, or as a burden instead of a blessing.

Many of us will suffer through all the working we need to do in life, only so that we can rush through a little bit of the playing we want to do in life, and it rarely occurs to us that the two could go hand in hand.

This will happen when we reduce a person to a producer of something that can be bought and sold, one commodity used to make other commodities, instead of seeing a person as a creature simply made to live well, and thereby to be happy. Work is not restricted to this or that career, but should rightly be the work of being human.

And while we like to complain and be miserable about our jobs, even as we make the value of our lives dependent on the money and reputation that go with a certain profession, I really do not need to play along with that game. A good life requires very little in the way of externals, far less than we might think, and all the rest I am complaining about involves the acquisition of vanities.

No, the work of the good life asks us only to rule ourselves, in cooperation with others. Even if we were made slaves in body, like Epictetus, we do not need to be slaves in soul, and even if another dedicates himself to doing me wrong, it is only my job to do him right.

Work will be a joy, not a hardship, when it is the act of living itself, not something I think I need to do in order to live.

My work is to be decent and kind, not to be rich and important. It starts and stops not by a time clock, but by the guidance of virtue.

Many years ago, while going home on the subway, a stranger looked over at me and grumbled, “Tough day at work?”

“It never ends, does it?” I replied.

“Tell me about it! So you take your job home with you too, huh?”

I smiled. “Can’t be helped if I want it done right.”

He nodded knowingly, though he had no idea that we were talking about two completely different things.

Written in 8/2008

IMAGE: Vincent van Gogh, Morning, Going Out to Work (1890)