Four (and a half) Lessons of Running

Riding home from the Illinois State Cross Country Championships yesterday, as the athletes slipped on headphones, turned to homework, or focused attention on computers, the van finally quieted enough to reflect.  My mind stretched back and out—to my own running experience, to my experience parenting a runner on our team, to serving as an assistant coach. I began thinking of the lessons of running, and this morning I wrote them down:

1. It’s the work that matters:

We call it “background mileage,” but it’s fundamentally familiarity, hours of stride chained to stride, all to habituate you to effort, all to find your best effort.  The doing makes you better.  Runners’ bodies become more efficient, but the real progress occurs elsewhere.  Their minds resize to accommodate greater expectations.  What seems Herculean becomes ordinary.  Ordinary becomes a way station to something longer, faster, harder.

2. Some days the bear will eat you, some days you eat the bear:

Besides being a Joan Armatrading song—and a common saying—this lesson becomes clear quickly.  You have “it” sometimes and other times not.  The successful runner must be resilient and recognize that, as much as everyone would like progress to be linear, it’s more like a planet in the night sky, looping in retrograde motion.  When you fall down, you get up. Sometimes your worst day falls on the wrong day, which keeps you needing another day and another and another.

2.5. Hard work trumps talent when talent doesn’t work hard:

If only this lesson were entirely true!  Day-in day-out labor brings surprising rewards that, over time, help you overcome untrained runners.  Believing in pure work keeps plodders dreaming.  Past a certain level, however, talent will win.  Every serious runner absorbs this lesson in humility: if you desire success, you must make the most of what you have—whatever you have—knowing it still might not be enough.  The pay-off is discovering that, though you’d love to have the work ethic AND the talent, you can satisfy for the work ethic.

3. Someone is always faster than you and someone always slower:

The real truth in the last lesson: no matter how talented or hardworking you are, you can’t expect to be the best in every single outing.  You will have bad days (see #2), others will have good days (see #2.5), and it’s not about where you finish in the end anyway (see #1 and #4).  I’ve stood at the finish line enough times to recognize all runners run the same race.  They have different, but equal, reasons to be proud.

4. Glory is everywhere:

For a runner, the glory is in diligence, hope, and survival.  No winner can claim those qualities exclusively.  Good luck, bad luck, good day, bad day, yesterday I watched some runners charge through the line, and others drift or limp over it.  I imagine some of them are still high from their triumphs and some still sore from their perceived failure.  Who’s to say who’s better in the end?  The attempt means everything and teaches the ultimate lesson: you have strengths to discover.

I made it all this way without alluding to Chariots of Fire, but now I can’t resist.  After winning a race, Eric Liddell, the flying Scotsman, tells a crowd of working people, “Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way. And where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.”

These lessons may emerge from any sport or any endeavor that requires devotion and labor.  However, as a coach, a runner, and the father of runners, I’m biased—what’s within makes my sport glorious.

My Extra Hour: On Complaint

As an exercise today, I wrote for exactly the extra hour the departure of daylight savings time allowed me…

I believe in healthy fictions—those not-really-true things you tell yourself  because, if you can only believe, life might be better.  I choose to believe I’m not absent-minded.  I think I can elude all those male stereotypes some people say are rooted deep in my gender.  If I leave something on a counter in the faculty lounge, I won’t accept it will be gone the next day.  I think positively.

But I also believe in complaining.

When I was growing up, my mother used to say, “Complaining won’t help,” and, as often happens with parental edicts, I’ve heard myself say those words.  Yet, as also often happens, I wonder if I’m parroting her.  My mother was right my complaining didn’t help anyone around me.  In fact, my whining may have made everyone in my family miserable.

And when my children come home from school and complain about all the work they must do before bed and I say, “Complaining won’t help,” I mean it won’t help me.  I have a great deal to accomplish in those hours too.  I fear a helpless, hopeless cloud will descend on us all and we won’t escape.  I don’t want to hear about it.

When my mother told me not to complain, I didn’t.  If I was ill or sad or resentful or peevish or hurt, I struggled to say nothing.  In a family of five children, you gain stature by being the maintenance-free one, the least fussy one.  Though I never attained that stature, I envied anyone who could swallow tears.  Spock on Star Trek was my hero and, just behind him, my older brother.

My stomach quickly filled with tears.  Perhaps I’m more sensitive or take everything as personal to myself, but my complaints sat barely arrested at the base of my throat.  Sometimes I couldn’t stop them.  Often stopping them meant removing myself altogether and living with the loneliness.  Other times I stopped them only to have them reappear like the contents of a finally-caught shark who disgorges lighters, beer can insulators, and hats.  Still, I never questioned my mother.

My son questions me.  He asks, in effect,  “Why isn’t it okay to feel the way I do?” and “Can anyone convince you how to feel?”  If keeping complaints to myself had worked, I might answer easily, but I understand what it’s like to have no right to your own feelings.  I’m sympathetic.  Part of me wants to capitulate.  “Go ahead,” I’d like to say, “complain if it will help you be heard, if it will help you move on, if it will help you feel loved.”  I also want to leave the room, but with more courage, less fear I’d be infected by complaint, I’d stay to listen.

Complaint is unbecoming, and, as writer, I also want to curb the dissatisfaction moving me to speak. Composing a tidy essay sometimes means imposing order on unease and false, insincere writing.  My students complain what a downer literature is—they don’t want to hear it—but if a writer can’t be heard, where will the tears go?

My petty complaints, I’ll keep to myself.  My big ones, my the-universe-is-all-wrong ones, I can’t.  In exchange for the ears of those around me, I’ll listen… as long as we can negotiate a reasonable time limit.

On Loving to Hate

The other day a student asked if I intended to read Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. I took a moment to recall the opening of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway repeats his father’s advice to “reserve all judgments.”

Then I said, “No way.  Not a chance.”

I ought to reserve judgment—particularly of books I haven’t read and particularly with students who benefit from any reading—but, when it comes to Dan Brown, I can’t help having an opinion.  When I read The Da Vinci Code a few years ago, I hated it so much that I stopped reading with five pages to go.  I could have stopped on the fifth page but wanted to hate it from a position of strength.  I needed a way to express my contempt more vividly.

If you love Dan Brown, I sincerely apologize.

I think you should stop reading now.

As an English teacher, I see books as my business and generally celebrate anyone appreciating any book.  In the past, I’ve had colleagues who’ve rejected some of the novels we teach as second rate, but, for me, a book students like is a good book.  I keep my misgivings about The Lord of the Flies to myself.  I bite my lip when students praise Of Mice and Men because I assume they sense something I’m too jaded to see.  I’ve never wanted to be the sort of snob who thinks we should teach Crime and Punishment instead of The Joy Luck Club because everyone knows that anyone who has a brain recognizes that Dostoyevsky is the better writer.

I generally don’t like hating books.  Though I listen patiently and recognize every citizen’s right to complain, I barely tolerate students who want to tell me (usually over and over and over) how little they enjoy the book I assigned them.  The fault, I say inwardly, may be the reader’s and not the writer’s.  Every book, I tell myself, offers something redeeming for the person who searches for it.

So why single out poor Dan Brown?

My wife finds it odd that I can muster such hatred toward so innocuous a figure. It is a little like hating white bread. I find my hatred odd too.  I state reasons—the amateurish way characters discuss clues as they flee from gunfire bugs me, as do the barely differentiated characters discussing these clues… endlessly, in tediously informative baby-step bits.  I’ve taught eighth graders who write more engaging dialogue, and the telling-heavy, showing-short chapters always, always, always end in cheesy and/or clumsy cliffhangers.

None of these objections, however, account for my hatred.  I sometimes play literary activist and say it’s a crime better writers go unpublished.  That’s certainly true, but worse writers are published too.  It’s occurred to me that, though I don’t author accounts of century-old global religious conspiracies couched as thrillers, maybe my hatred is jealousy.

When people who love Dan Brown chide me for spoiling their fun, I do feel guilty.  What’s wrong with a little jigsaw solving—even if it is a puzzle of finite, identically shaped pieces?  My hatred is irrational, and, being a rational man, I know the cure.  I should buy The Lost Symbol, strap myself to a chair and read it, cover to cover.  While I’m at it, I’ll read Twilight and all those other novels everyone else talks about too.

But I can already feel a biological fireball gathering in my lizard brain.  Please, oh Lord, don’t ever let me meet Mr. Brown.  I’ll be nice, but I might have to keep my hand over my mouth to arrest the sneer overcoming me.

Which—I know, I know—is not my best expression.

Ahead and Behind

Other runners must have the same daydream—shambling along at my tired pace, I look up and imagine the back of my younger self racing out of reach ahead.  The two of us can’t be split and still be one person, but, if we could be, he’d be winning.

Like most ex-competitive runners over fifty, my best times are behind me. I’ve nearly used up the expression, “Back in the day.”

Little in life is as quantifiable as the time it once took you to cover a distance.  I don’t figure my time completing projects at work or my efficiency answering e-mails—but I remember my best at every distance.  The numbers have remained relevant because the high school cross country athletes I coach—including my son—periodically ask me, “What’s your fastest at…?”

But I’m sensible enough to know how meaningless those numbers really are.  Some runners—even ones whose bodies have long betrayed them—still see themselves as an X-minute, Y-seconds Z-distance runner.  They regale you with former workouts and stellar performances at races that occurred decades ago.  Their triumphs are as fresh as last weekend.

Okay, me too.  But usually I wait to be asked and tell the story with disbelief.  Those performances belong to someone else.  That I once ran so fast astounds me.  What astounds me even more is that I once trained hard enough to attain those times.

The biggest difference between me and the imaginary younger runner ahead is the spirit behind his dedication.  He has a naive faith in sacrifice, the cumulative effect of daily work, and the tolerance of pain.  He has no excuse for taking it easy—mostly because he doesn’t take it easy—and he’s never as impressed with himself as he hopes to be after his next race.  He’s not nostalgic because it’s not time yet.

His perspective is what I miss, not the times or even the body that produced the times.  I’m lucky I get to work with young runners filled with hope and am grateful so much of their spirit that rubs off on me.  However, experience, especially the sort that tells you what’s possible, makes you resistant to their sort of ambition.

Perhaps it’s time for another dream. For me, the hardest part of aging has been feeling less hopeful.  My racing years have ended, and I could turn to other goals, but little seems as quantifiable—verifiable—as those old times do.  Strangely, new tasks often feel like starting over.  Another magnitude of desire seems required.  I gulp very hard to toe the line.

I’d love to shout to the young man ahead of me—ask him to stop for a moment and indulge an old man with a little advice—how does he do it?  I’d love to get a pat on the back, a smile, and a shove.

You Were Saying…

Sometimes I view language the same way a scientist might see gloves anchored into the side of a containment box—better than nothing but still not the same as handling the subject.

Most of the time, I don’t separate words and what they name, but occasionally the labels come off or,  even if they stay on, obscure the things under them.  Why do we still call a computer a “computer” when the actual computing it does is negligible?  Who decided “dog” or “cat” fall under “pets”?  How can the same orchid have an “odor” to one person and an “aroma” to another?

Perhaps the brain needs dreams to elude language, to find terms less distant from what they describe.  Though I’ve always heard you can’t read in dreams, I seem to.  Yet, oddly, those words are more objects than signals, their identity pure text—curves and lines, spacing and thickness.

Writing poetry approaches the dreamy feeling language is a thing.  Sometimes the music of the poem is already written, and I need only find words—maybe any—to go along.  If a struggle ensues, it’s between the underlying sound and the accompanying language’s insistence on meaning and logic.  The words have to go together, after all, and be understood by someone else.  Otherwise the best they might aspire to is opera, lovely gibberish.

But I love gibberish.

Ludwig Wittgenstein thought language defined and limited our world—it was not the vehicle but the driver, he thought.  “Uttering a word,” he said, “is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”  The word creates the thought, and when we disassociate a word and examine it instead of what it describes, we find ourselves on what he called “frictionless ice,” lost and unable to rescue ourselves.

Maybe, but lots of organisms seem to do quite well with language much less devoted to abstraction.  We want to be able to put words to everything, as if we meant to equip all reality with handles.  Do ants, butterflies or mountain goats want anything so ambitious?  Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.”  Living closer to the world as it is rather than as it’s described, his lion might not need to talk about freedom or angst.  He might have words only for the basic needs our language buries under mounds of verbiage and lets molder.

Sometimes I wonder if words are our species’ fatal flaw, the reason we can’t live in the world without warring against it and the germ of our extinction.

I have to believe in a wordless world, if only to escape the double life of being and thinking.  If you desire to live in the present, you have to sense it without intermediaries, to see it without its armature of vocabulary and syntax.  You must dream it.

Birthday Story

Today is my birthday, and rather than writing reflections as an essay, I thought I’d create a sort of parable to gather all the different thoughts I have about celebrating this day.  This sort-of story is a little surreal and a lot cryptic and very experimental but closer to the confusion I always feel on this day.  For me, writing often means settling things, which sometimes feels false.  I grow so tired of conclusions.  As strange as this piece may seem, perhaps it mirrors what’s in my head today better than an essay might…

Every citizen cycled through the duty, so the remnants of waiting littered the post—half-written notes, tiny totems built of splinters or carved from fragments of shattered wall, a stack of reading well-worth abandoning in the middle.  You were to sound a bell if you saw anyone outside the town walls, but someone long ago yanked the bell’s rope down.  It lay in a shadowy corner like a sleeping snake.

His turn came once a year like everyone else’s, but his stay there felt continuous.  He’d just been pacing in front of the narrow window, just craning his neck to stick his face out and catch scents borne by the wind’s new direction.  Out there were winds.  They whipped tiny circles of dirt in the expanse surrounding the town.  In the absence of anyone arriving, those ghost dervishes came closest to company.  He imagined they were trying to tell him history no one knew.  They’d traveled and he hadn’t, after all.

And he imagined a figure walking out of the horizon, a blur at first, a flicker that could be something loose in a current of air, and then actually a thing with legs and volition moving consciously, purposefully toward him.  Not everyone took this duty seriously anymore—most spent the time sleeping and dreaming—but he’d never been able to accept being alone.  Someday someone would materialize in the distance, and he’d watch, each step of the strange shape erasing a little of the calm forbearance he’d been taught to value.

The hours at the post made his eyes sore with watching and his psyche tired with longing.  He may have dozed a little because, for just a moment, he was sure the figure in the distance would be himself, coming into focus like a reflection in a bowl of water as it comes to rest.  That picture of fate seemed fleetingly right to him.  He was really looking for himself, another self who came from the outside instead of projecting itself onto nights of black and stars.

He shook himself awake, and the fantasy evaporated.  Out on the horizon, the line of trees thinned for fall. A week ago, he knew, some trees must have seemed to burst into flames as their leaves changed, but that hadn’t been on his watch.  He always arrived just after, and sometimes whatever changed in his life since his previous duty felt as wan as trees graying in anticipation of winter.

Soon he’d hear the knock signaling the next watch. He lifted a little statue from a crowded shelf and studied its shape, a woman’s figure whose belly and breasts promised fertility.  Her head and face were unfinished, but he read her inscrutable expression as concentration on the moment she would be two, herself and her child.  His own mother had that moment, and he wondered, for perhaps the first time, how her waiting felt, the inevitable arriving so slowly as to seem invisible and yet rushing up with an undeniable, physical urgency.

And the thought roused him.  He gathered his things to go.  When the door opened, he would be relieved for another year of living.  His eyes off the horizon, he thought of all the different arrivals the world offers.  He thought of his own children, sitting near the windows, looking for their father’s figure rounding the corner.

If I Ruled the School

The musical “Pippin” contains a song called, “If I Ruled the World.” I’m not crazy about the song, but I like the concept.  Thinking about utopian ideals is fun and valuable even if you don’t have the wherewithal to rule anything.

I think about the perfect school. A small part of my musing comes from chafing against institutions whose aims I can’t entirely support, but a much larger part is thinking that, after more than 25 years teaching, I know something about what education is and how it should work.

In The End of Education, Neil Postman wrote that most schools get caught up in physical and practical questions about how to run things—how to integrate technology in the classroom, how to create a schedule that rotates classes or allows for a longer lunch, how to improve faculty to student ratios (usually without hiring teachers).  They never get around to the metaphysical question of what students and teachers are doing there.

My perfect school starts with a metaphysical premise: education is impractical.  Anyone expecting to be specifically prepared for work life or hoping to gather some particular body of knowledge had better go elsewhere.  Schooling wastes all sorts of resources and can’t turn a profit (or even break even) because education is a fundamentally unreliable transaction.  Seek effective economies of scale and control everything a school offers and still so much rests on the students and whether they understand and absorb what you are serving.  Inputs and outcomes rarely match—sometimes the most inefficient and expensive way is nonetheless the best way.  Sometimes tremendous expense yields a result that might occur much more simply and cheaply.

And there’s no universal answer, no single magic that works on every student.  You have to keep the wand waving broadly and hope that somewhere someone feels charmed.

Which suggests to me that school should focus on training, mental exercise to develop, discipline, and generally groom brains.  While addressing future jobs seems impossible, we can predict students will need to use their minds resourcefully.

I know people hate warm and fuzzy pronouncements like these because they don’t translate into bricks, dollars, or payrolls.  They don’t answer how many desks are needed or how the school day times out.  They don’t assure every student a reliable product.

Yet my thinking does lead to some practical possibilities for my perfect high school:

1. Scrap the subjects system: Right now nearly every high school has classes in English, Languages, Math, Science, Arts, and History, but some of the most dramatic and valuable learning occurs between the classes when students learn to apply the thinking skills they use in one subject to another.  We could offer classes with two concentrations—math and science, for instance, or art and writing.
2. Cover less and uncover more: Why not have four required classes in high school instead of five or six?  As each could be a combination of two traditional subjects, we could still expect students to cover all the traditional subjects while minimizing the plate-spinning most high school students engage in now
3. Teach students to speak and think in languages earlier: Youthful brains soak up syntax and vocabulary unconsciously, and if students learn language earlier, they might take a literature class in their second language instead of English.  If you wait until high school, they will have to muscle through, requiring grammar and drills to take in what they might have done more enjoyably and gently earlier.
4. No grades: Grades encourage extrinsic motivation and academic bulimia inconsistent with learning. While grades allow schools to assess students in a nearly industrial way, marks often discourage enthusiasm.  The end and not the means can come to matter most.  As impractical and unwieldy as it may be, students deserve qualitative assessment. A student who is trying hard benefits much more from a conversation than an “C.”
5. Look for teachers who are good at teaching: Combining subjects would require more flexible teachers, people more notable for their instruction than their knowledge.  Obviously, instructors must know their area well to answer the questions students ask, but they should also model learning by grappling with the same “in-betweenness” students will face.
6. Add choices: Students might perform better if they could navigate by their talents and interests instead of by a chart of requirements.  We should reward students for pursuing their passions, not for their capacity to excel at tasks that mean little or nothing to them. The exposure we wish for students should be a wide range of mental activity: expressing, experimenting, decoding, figuring, explaining, solving, and other broadly applicable abilities. If every class addressed vital mental competencies, the subject would matter less.
7. Make every class a laboratory: We often give students a thousand little pieces to assemble on their own time.  Instead, we might greet them with a task that requires them to identify, develop, and apply knowledge necessary to achieve that task.  Have a class stage a scene from Shakespeare or write an analysis of a recent event without any parameters at all.
8. Less homework: Students don’t need more to do.  Brain research indicates that a good night’s sleep does more for education than an additional hour of drudgery.  While some homework may be a necessary evil, learning occurs in quiet moments of reflection too.  Students need time to mull over what they’ve encountered.  Drilling may be necessary and can’t always happen during class, but any homework should focus on relevance and, whenever possible, thinking comprehensively.
9. Attend to surroundings: Learning can occur anywhere, but a warm and comfortable setting assures students that the school cares.  The corporate school communicates something else—that what’s needed is simply a place to hold classes rather than a place to enjoy community and the common purpose of learning.
10. Explain everything: Many students feel acted upon, and resentment arises from any obligation, but some student diffidence comes from poorly communicated objectives and rules that, without justification, seem arbitrary.  Whenever and however possible and within limits, students ought to participate meaningfully in running the school.  Schools exist for them after all, and not the other way around.

If this blog had more readers, I might worry about attacks on my plans as unrealistic, vague, or just plain loony.  In case my proposal upsets anyone, however, I’ll put up one preliminary defense.  When school starts tomorrow, I will reenter my classroom enthusiastically and do my best to take advantage of all that’s good in our current system.

I’m just dreaming, and you can’t fault a person for that.

Laughing at Our Own Expense

We have turned into hanging judges laughing all the way.  As evidence I offer a response to a new ad on TV.  It’s a minor example, but it will do.

In this commercial, a narrator caught in an uncomfortable close-up describes being depressed as feeling like a wind-up doll needing constant attention.  She spins the key in the doll’s back, and it stoops and fades.  She winds it up again, it lurches forward a few steps and dies, its head turned slightly in hope of another fix of kinetic energy.

On YouTube you’ll find a version where someone has inserted snarky speech bubbles saying things like, “Oh great.  This pill makes you walk like a total loser with a load in their pants” and a number of other comments LOLing and deriding the original as just as lame and just as funny.  One featured comment says:

Thank you [insert drug name here] for making me laugh my ass off all day. I haven’t seen anything this retarded on TV in a long time. This is one of the world’s worst commercial’s [sic] ever, in my opinion…

I understand.  The tight focus on the doll’s pained expression is a little creepy and weird, and her constipated walk would never remind anyone of any toy a child would want.  I understand why someone who has never experienced depression could find antidepressants and toys laughably dissonant.  The advertiser tried to make the doll depressed but instead may have turned depression into a toy… a profitable toy apparently.

Yet equally troubling is the reaction to the ad because—though I disapprove of direct advertising by pharmaceutical companies and have never been sure what to think about antidepressants—the metaphor seems apt.  The prop may be funny, but the idea that a depressed person requires constant winding, that being depressed means vigilance and a perpetual application of will to move forward, all that is vividly true.

And even if the ad is odious (and I can think of many ads no one notices that seem worse to me), the judgment of it is disproportionate.  Clicking on the “more info” line for the comment above reveals more observations:

If you are clinically depressed enough that this commercial is appealing to you, maybe there is nothing left for you, but to have a creepy wind-up doll version of yourself to cart around to family picnics and wiffleball games. Seriously, if this drug makes you this messed up, maybe you were better before. Now you have to worry about some Puppetmaster, Chuckie, voodoo doll homicidal doll action on top of your depression. This will surely lead to paranoid schizophrenia. So please people, do not take this pill.

In its appeal to humor, the extended comment transposes the figurative and literal.  The commercial isn’t really suggesting depression is a doll you have to cart around to family picnics.  But that isn’t my issue with it, nor are the pop allusions, nor are the mechanical errors in the comment or the quite unmedical and irrational advice to avoid the drug because the ad for it is dumb.

I may place myself at the dock for judgment, and I don’t want to answer disproportion with disproportion by using one comment on YouTube to indict modernity but, to use our ubiquitous expression, WTF?

Our world abounds with judgment.  Town Hall attendees equate Obama’s plan to help the uninsured with Nazis who systematically slaughtered millions.  A senator shouts “You lie” before the president has even has his say.  And, as funny as John Stewart and Steven Colbert are, we watch their sarcasm in place of actual journalism.  Their targets, the “news analysts” on other networks, may be even worse.

You can say I’m overreacting and that the extreme judgment of our age is more public than new, but I wonder if more is at stake now. When judgment takes the place of deliberation—when humor trumps empathy and wit passes for reason—we may suffer a much worse fate than being subjected to silly ads.

Thinking of a Thing

There’s a machine as smooth and as monumental as cut marble, its face offering no buttons, dials, levers, or sliding knobs, no means at all to control its actions.  The machine is one monolithic thing, and, though many picture its face covering gold and jeweled innards moving with balletic precision, the best listener will hear and see no evidence, not a click, sigh, or squeak, no whirring or grinding or trembling.  If you could pick it up and shake it—you can’t, it’s too big—you wouldn’t find a speck of dust rattling inside. The internal atmosphere sealed in the machine could be just as solid as whatever workings it conceals.  In every way, it’s perfect.

Its purpose is also hidden.  Some people say they know what it does, and others believe them.  They claim to see its products everywhere, though no exit port or other means to emit or broadcast appears on any of its surfaces.  To all but a select and suspect few, its effects are invisible—no odor, no palpable movement, no echo or taste on the wind.  And, because no one entirely knows what he or she has felt (or trusts another to say what he or she has felt), people sometimes speculate the machine has no purpose we can understand, perhaps no purpose at all. They say expecting a function is underestimating the machine’s power. Doing is not the only reason for being, they state, and besides, “Must a machine have utility?”

The question often sets off shouting over definitions.  If we call the machine a machine, we have to expect something to come of it and, if nothing comes of it, we cannot call it a machine.  Heady reasoning spins in a perpetual whirl.  Some try to end the cyclone by renaming the machine, but we’ve called it what we have for so long, just about everyone rejects semantics. Sometimes they turn on those who dare to name it.  Presumption like that is hubris, they scream.

Though many try, no one has made another machine.

Where is the maker?  Who remembers back that far? A few meek voices try to assert it’s been around as long as we have because its workings are our workings, its face our face reflected back by its impenetrable and shiny surface, but the idea we invented the machine seems to pierce a pipe under pressure—the emotion jets.  You can’t hear anyone over the din of its spray.

Maybe the machine is broken, as some say. Maybe we stopped it with our stares.  Or maybe it’s time to store our perceptions of the machine in our imaginations—inexplicable factories themselves—and move on, living our lives with all the love we can muster.

The Value of Labor

The other day, I participated with a group of students in a day of service.  Our assignment was to add mulch to a newly created trail, and we pitchforked the stuff from a pile into wheelbarrows and then rolled loads some distance to where the trail needed it.

The day was hot.  The pitchforks were unwieldy.  The mulch was dense and smelly.  The distances we pushed these heavy wheelbarrows were great, and the terrain we pushed them over was thick with uncut and uneven grass.  It was challenging.

Within minutes, some students pawed the pile with their pitchforks like children faced with heaping helpings of spinach.  They paused more than they shoveled and soon it was time for a water break and another water break and a conversation with friends or with the nearest teacher about other jobs that weren’t as arduous and should have been spread around.

To be fair, the students didn’t choose this day of service.  It was required.  Part of me doesn’t blame them for recoiling from labor they didn’t seek and didn’t anticipate, but we just wanted them to know what service is, what it means to labor for a cause. We hoped they get a taste for it.

And some did. While some students shirked, others filled wheelbarrows and rolled them away, returning ready to do it again and again.  They smiled.  I worked beside them, filling wheelbarrows as fast and full as I could, trying to set a good example but also simply reveling in it. I walked away exhausted. I knew I’d sleep well that night.

Back on the bus, we teachers looked over our crew to decide whom we’d hire if we were real bosses.  The best candidates dug into the work and did their best without questioning why they ought to. They needed no motivation beyond the task itself. The worst considered the work beneath them, complaining how tired everything made them.

The older I get, the more confused I am about good-tired and bad-tired.  Cleaning the stove exhausts me and so does clearing out my work e-mails and sending piles of paper to their proper file folders. Sometimes everything makes me feel spent.

People say good-tired comes with a sense of accomplishment, but accomplishment is relative and I’m not sure how meaningful it is in the end.  No one with any sense can think rice won’t boil over again or that papers won’t re-gather on your desk.  Even a one-time event—the sort that ought to be an accomplishment, like a marathon or graduation—doesn’t end anything.  Your ambitions stretch until past accomplishments look like youthful flailing, not nearly as purposeful as you thought they were and not nearly as important as what’s next.  You have to do more.

Like everyone else, I sometimes find myself doing daily tasks that continue without question.  My to-do list includes jobs that contribute to bigger jobs that contribute to completing my capital-J Job according to standards I’ve set, but those standards don’t dominate my work life.  Little chores do.  I’m only dimly aware of my ambitions.  Most of the time, I just work.

And I have to look for enjoyment in it.  I feel sorry for anyone who can’t find pleasure in just working.

Oh, I occasionally feel like a mule and pull against my rope—sometimes tedium so overwhelms me I want to cry—but I can also find the simplest work satisfying.  When it comes to work, my best state of mind is doing, not ambition, worth, or even accomplishment.

That’s the only way I know to make exhaustion good.