Work: Satisfaction and Shock Absorber

In living with ourselves, and in learning to live with life, work is one of life’s surest satisfactions, and one of its surest shock absorbers. Work is much less wearing than worry, and often it isn’t so much the work we do that wears us away as the friction and frustration of not using life in a way that gives an inner peace and a deep-seated satisfaction. Work is a basic law of life. The Lord God has said so. The use of intelligence and talents and the creative and productive powers of mind and of muscle is expected of us. Without the dignity of work, without a sense of usefulness and accomplishment, men surely deteriorate, and lose some self-respect, and the feeling of being a contributing part. After all we owe a kind of rent⎯for the space we occupy on earth, for the beauty and the sustenance, and the privilege of living life. By reason of being alive we have a responsibility to study, to learn, to work, to develop, contribute, serve, improve, to pay a debt to the past, to pay our way in the present, and to pass on something to the future. And there is waste⎯waste of time, of talent, of energy and effort, of life⎯without willing, useful work. The Lord God himself has set the example in his own creative activity, and there is evidence in nature of an ever on-going creative, productive process. There is a straightening, healing power in useful, willing work. “Work,” said Thomas Carlyle, “is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind⎯honest work, which you intend getting done.” “Blessed is he who has found his work;…”