Do NOT despise your work.
Your work of service adds value to life in a civilized world. Many hands make light work and our various contributions lead to a better way of life for all and sundry.
The following extract of Lester DeKoster's masterful discourse on work is something that we can mull over and reflect on why we ought to stay motivated about the work that we do:
"Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others ... in which others make themselves useful to us. We plant [with our work]; God gives the increase to unify the human race ...
[Look at] the chair you are lounging in .... Could you have made it for yourself? ... How [would you] get, say, the wood? Go and fell a tree? But only after first making the tools for that, and putting together some kind of vehicle to haul the wood, and constructing a mill to do the lumber and roads to drive on from place to place? In short, a lifetime or two to make one chair! ... If we ... worked not forty but one-hundred-forty hours per week we couldn't make ourselves from scratch even a fraction of all the goods and services that we call our own. [Our] paycheck turns out to buy us the use of far more than we could possibly make for ourselves in the time it takes us to earn the check .... Work yields far more in return upon our efforts than our particular jobs put in ....
Imagine that everyone quits working, right now! What happens? Civilized life quickly melts away. Food vanishes from the shelves, gas dries up at the pumps, streets are no longer patrolled, and fires burn themselves out. Communication and transportation services end, utilities go dead. Those who survive at all are soon huddled around campfires, sleeping in caves, clothed in raw animal hides. The difference between [a wilderness] and culture is simply, work."
Indeed, if we approach our work with the knowledge that we are at the first rendering a service and the monetary rewards or compensation are only a by-product, that would be revolutionary!
No comments:
Post a Comment