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More Than What We Do Reverend Amy Zucker September 28, 2003 Palo Alto, CA
Let's take a few minutes for an exercise. In your order of service is an insert that’s blank except for the words “I am.” Write down as many statements as you can that describe yourself, all completing the sentence "I am . . ." This is totally private; we're not going to share any of it. Just write as many as you can without stopping until I say “time’s up."
Now, let's each look over our lists. As Wayne Muller writes, there are many ways to describe oneself. I’m going to suggest several; you don’t need to raise your hands unless you want to, just answer these questions for yourself. How many of your "I ams" are about the work you do for a living, or once did?
I wonder how these answers would differ in another culture. A former congregant of mine whose sister lived in England was told by her that the English seldom ask what one does for a living, nor do they expect one to ask them. Here in the U.S., at least among the subcultures I know best, it's one of the first things we ask of a new acquaintance: "And what do you do?"
As an experiment I tried to break this habit for awhile. It was hard to do. I wasn't sure how to initiate a conversation without that basic question. Trying to find other angles forced me to think about people differently: who are we besides our occupations? The exercise we just did helped answer that question. I’m sure everyone here came up with something besides their jobs for that list.
And yet when we first meet someone, we do tend to describe ourselves primarily by what we do. You can see the pressure getting to people who are unemployed or whose only work is unpaid, or whose days are devoted to raising children or making a home; if you’re one of them, perhaps you’ve felt it.
Sometimes we use the language of the workplace to justify these other identities. I have heard a friend's daughter ask her whether she likes her part-time job, and heard the friend reply, "Yes, but my favorite job is being your mom." I applaud the sentiment, and I appreciate that she was trying to tell her daughter that she, not some job, was at the center of Mommy's life. But it makes me wonder why so many of us feel compelled to describe our relationships as jobs. It isn't just my friend–it's an epidemic. It seems that a lot of us feel that, in order for an aspect of our lives to be valid and important, it has to be describable as a job–even if that isn't the way we think of it at all.
It's as if the only valid way of describing who you are is what you do–preferably what you do for a living.
With a dozen different indexes, social scientists have documented how much more time we are all spending on our jobs nowadays, in sharp contrast to the rhetoric of the ease and leisure of American life. Some people have grown concerned enough about the impact of this trend that they have created Take Back Your Time Day, to be observed for the first time next month. They point out just how much work has come to dominate our lives. “We're putting in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s, despite promises of a coming age of leisure before the year 2000. In fact, we're working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country. Mandatory overtime is at near record levels, in spite of a recession. Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks. On average, we work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) longer per year than our peers in Western Europe do.”
That is why Take Back Your Time Day has been set for October 24: because by the end of that week, we will have already worked as many hours as our peers in other industrialized nations do in the entire year–but we’ll have another nine weeks to go. Think of what we could do with those 350 hours if we weren’t pressed by mandatory overtime, economic tension, and the expectations of our culture and our employers to spend it on the job.
An Australian I know observes with amazement the 50, 55, 60 hour weeks Americans put in. Australia is a hardworking nation, with a strong economy. But people there work eight hours, and when the day is over, they go home; when the weekend comes, they relax. She says they wouldn’t think of giving away their evenings to their jobs; that time is for leisure, family, other interests, sleep. As the folks behind Take Back Your Time Day say, the purpose of the movement “is not anti-work. Useful and creative work is essential to happiness. But American life has gotten way out of balance. Producing and consuming more have become the single-minded obsession of the American economy, while other values–strong families and communities, good health and a clean environment, active citizenship and social justice, time for nature and the soul--are increasingly neglected.” To see the direct correlation between the number of hours we work and the neglect these other areas of life suffer, consider for a moment (and if you aren’t currently working, consider how those close to you who are might answer):
All of these parts of our lives are important, and they are given less and less time as our work lives take up more and more. And so Take Back Your Time Day proposes that on Friday, October 24, all of us who work take off for the day or part of the day, and devote that time to resting, being with the people we care about, reading the newspaper, reading a novel, cooking dinner from scratch, going to the movies, volunteering in our community. If a day off sounds like too big a step, here’s a more modest proposal. Work no more than eight hours that day; take your full lunch break and the other breaks due you during the day; and work no more than forty hours that week. If you aren’t working a job, ask those in your life who do to take back their time so that you can spend it together for a change.
Ruth Robertson worked her magic and got the book Take Back Your Time in to the bookstore in time for today’s service, so that we can read more about the impact of this issue on our lives, and discuss it with one another.
Some information about Take Back Your Time Day is also on the Social Justice table on the patio, where I encourage you to have a look at it after the service. This is a social justice issue. Requiring people to work overtime was made illegal in this country a long time ago, but the gains made by those who struggled for decent working conditions have been nibbled away over the succeeding decades. Fewer people are being asked to do more of the work, while at the same time, millions of workers both skilled and unskilled are unemployed.
It’s also a spiritual issue. We often judge the successfulness of our days by how much we accomplish, how many items on our to-do lists got checked off. I don’t think it’s just the rise in the cost of living and the fall in real wages that keep us rushing from one task to another. I think we often feel as if the more we do, the more we are. And if we’re not doing anything, then we’re nobody.
When we describe ourselves, day in, day out, by what we do, we send ourselves a subtle but clear message: This Is Who You Are. Take away the job, the role, the title, the accomplishments, and there’s nothing left.
But it’s not true. We are not what we do. We are more than that. But sometimes grow so busy with what we do that we don’t see what else we are.
A Zen teacher was once asked why so few people stick with meditation practice. He said, “Because it’s boring.” The reason it’s boring is that it is precisely about stopping all the doing. For the same reason, it can be a little scary. You spend an hour just sitting, and all the busy busy busyness drops away. (Sylvia Boorstein titled one of her books on meditation: Don’t Just Do Something–Sit There!) The scariness comes in because our busyness and our doing conceal what’s underneath, and maybe sometimes we’re afraid that there’s nothing there. What we may find, if we stop doing and just be, is that something is still there. It’s a self that always changes, that is fluid–but that fluidity gives us a flexibility that we sometimes forget we have.
Several years ago, listening to the radio, I heard the obituary of a man who had done many, many things in his 86 years. He was a chemist and professor for several decades at Berkeley, Glenn Seaborg. The accomplishment that got him an obituary on national radio was that he had co-discovered the element plutonium. But he had also had a hand in the discovery of 10 other elements, revised the periodic table to accommodate the new class of elements, led the Manhattan Project's plutonium work that garnered enough plutonium to make the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, wrote over 500 scientific articles and several books, served as advisor to ten presidents (from FDR to George Bush), and was chancellor of the university.
Prizes and honors mark his many achievements: the Nobel Prize, the National Medal of Science, 50 honorary doctoral degrees, fellowship in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and so on and so forth.
And all of these led to one more accomplishment that really caught my notice and made me laugh: Dr. Seaborg was recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest entry in Who's Who.
The title of Who's Who is another one of those things that sends the message that who we are equals what we do. The title hints that if you want to know the essence of a person, if you want to know who she really is, you can look in this book.
But this volume of accomplishments can't tell us the things that are most important about a person: who someone is when she isn't doing anything. It should really be called Who’s Done What. It isn’t about being, but about doing–doing all sorts of fine things, certainly, like conducting groundbreaking scholarship or running faster than any other human being. It’s a perfectly good book for finding out what someone has done. But what it can’t tell us is who someone is. That secret is not embedded in anything we have done. It goes deeper than that, and can be known only to the people who know us best. Maybe it can only be known to us. And it won’t be known to anyone, even our closest friends, even ourselves, unless we have stopped doing long enough to listen inside and hear the answer to “Who am I?”
The things we do can tell something, sometimes quite a lot, about the kind of people we are. Dr. Seaborg's entry, his list of accomplishments and activities, paints a picture of a man who was not only hardworking and scientifically brilliant, but concerned for the future, courageous in his moral stands, and devoted to offering others the education he cherished for himself. He was active for nuclear disarmament from the beginning of the Cold War. Really, from before then, because with six others he wrote to President Truman before the bomb was used to urge him to demonstrate its power by bombing a barren island rather than a city. He headed the Atomic Energy Commission, advocating the regulation of nuclear energy in the years when it was new. He served on the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which published A Nation at Risk, and chaired Science Service, which is devoted to science education for schoolchildren. And yes, Who's Who does also tell us that he raised 6 children and was married for 57 years, until his death in 1999.
These things he did do tell us something about the essence of the man. And they were important. After all, our values, however fine and noble, don’t mean much unless we translate them into action. But the accomplishments weren’t the sum total of who he was, or even what made him the person he was. They were the outward evidence and the expression of his personality, of his values, of his moral engagement with the world in which he lived.
What we do is a part of who we are, but it's not the whole package. Take it all away, and there's still an awful lot left. And so there is nothing wrong with doing, but let’s take the time to know why we're doing. Sometimes it’s fear, desperation, a desire to prove ourselves, to earn our spot on this earth. Activity muddies and obscures the self, like a pond stirred up by hard rain. Letting our busy-ness subside, taking the time for quiet, allows us to regain our clarity. If we work, setting limits on our work allows us time for the other elements of our life that also form the core of who we are.
India has a sort of retirement plan that might guide us. Retirement is supposed to be a time of well-earned rest and a chance to spend time on our interests and family, but it is a crisis for many people in the U.S. We feel useless if we're not earning money, going off to work each day, "doing something constructive." When we’re unemployed, or working full-time at raising children, we find that people are made very uncomfortable by our answer to the question “What do you do?” Retirees often face the same problem. With the belief that who we are is what we do, it's little wonder that retirement can be a time of deep depression and a crisis of meaning. All our lives we stave off the fear of meaninglessness by filling our lives with purposeful activity; having nothing we need to do is understandably frightening.
In India, many people close out their lives with such a period of reflection. When they have worked for many years and their families are provided for, they sell their businesses and belongings and take up a life of spiritual learning and contemplation. They may wander the country, spend their days in meditation, read scriptures, or follow a spiritual teacher. We might call it dropping out; a better term would be coming in to a new stage of life: one more vital and real than the busy doing that filled the earlier decades. It’s a chance to just be.
It’s a good model, and one that the organizers of Take Back Your Time Day are encouraging all workers to try–not when we retire, but now. Let’s not allow work, an important but narrow portion of our lives, to crowd out everything else. Let’s not wait until the last quarter of our lives to spend time in being and knowing who we are. Let’s do it now. As the folks behind Take Back Your Time Day like to say, “There’s no present like the time.”
What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Amy Zucker
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