I don’t think we can discuss meaningful work without discussing the spiritual. I consider myself a pilgrim without a spiritual or religious axe to grind or system to sell you. Linking up with our fundamental source is a path toward wholeness and enlightenment, and the spiritual, within a religious tradition or not, is reflected in the work we do and how we do it.
Guidance Everywhere
We have apparently been born with an inner guidance system, most directly accessible through our inner voice, through prayer, through meditation, the symbology of our dreams, and the myths that underlie our culture. All we need to do is open ourselves to it and explore the messages that are constantly being offered. This is crucial to finding vocation, purpose, and meaning, because as we understand ourselves, guidance seems to come from everywhere, and life becomes purposeful and magical. And this is the foundation of hope.
We seem to be intuitive mythmakers, which is a way to make truth available to ourselves as we grow in understanding. An eternal conflict is being waged between the light and the dark, between the spiritual and the material, and every human predicament, every historical situation, is a phase of the struggle. “Be kind,” said the philosopher Philo of Alexandria, “for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
Every situation we face with our work is also part of this ongoing challenge.
Inner Life
“Enlightened management is one way of taking religion seriously, profoundly, deeply, and earnestly,” Abraham Maslow wrote,
Of course, for those who define religion just as going to a particular building on Sunday and hearing a particular kind of formula repeated, this is all irrelevant. But for those who define religion ... in terms of deep concern with the problems of human beings, with the problems of ethics, of the future of man, then this kind of philosophy, translated into the work life, turns out to be very much like the new style of management and of organization.... And the qualities of the superior managers have been worked out, i.e., they are more democratic, more compassionate, more friendly, more helpful, more loyal... a certain kind of democratic manager makes more profit for the firm as well as making everybody happier and healthier.
No matter how much you’ve explored your inner life, you can still ask the questions that are key to finding meaning in your work.
• What is it that you most love, most care about?
• What goes on inside your head and your heart as you first awake, as you drive to and from your job?
Though the answer springs from the unconscious, it is your companion. It is your love. It is your addiction. It is your quality. It is your meaning. It is your ruler. What we do reflects our inner life. By looking at what we actually spend our time doing, we can know what our inner life is all about. Unless, of course, what you’re doing is killing your inner life.
Numbness
You may be numb from everyday coping with your job or business. There is the constant hammering of responsibility, the juggling of priorities, the competitors trying to eat your niche for lunch and gradually, imperceptibly, you deaden. Your work doesn’t work for you anymore. It doesn’t make you alive anymore. In fact, it has become deadly boring. But what to do? Your security is important, and considering all this is risky. You have a mortgage and car payments. But what if you could be more fulfilled doing something completely different?
You notice that you’re beginning not to care much about anything but your own family and close friends. There’s just too much sadness and tragedy in the world, way too much to do anything about. There is much more you would like to do, but you need a paycheck and the choices for how to get one are few, so you just soldier on, give where you can, help when you can, but it doesn’t fulfill that deep desire for meaning.
Deadening your feelings may be your only way to cope, but the problem is, as Helen Keller reminded us, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched. They must be felt with the heart.” Closing off our hearts to the pain may also close us off to the feelings of awe and beauty, our reasons for being alive.
Why Work?
Years ago my parents owned a weekend home in a community built around a golf course and lake. There were many bored retirees there, living “the good life”—which seemed to consist of a daily schedule of rising late, getting boozed up in the afternoon, going out to dinner, and crashing early, drunk in front of the tube. Was this worth working a lifetime for?
I tried retiring for a while, still many years before retirement age. We moved our family to acreage in redwood country, off the grid. It was great living in nature, with the river, horses, and goats—paradise. But it wasn’t long before restlessness set in. I started driving to town a lot and hanging out in bookstores. Then came complete existential boredom. Was this the American dream everyone was talking about: being useless? Maybe I was a workaholic, needing to cover a hole in my soul by escaping through work. But I certainly didn’t feel that. The ennui was much more born of a feeling that I still had work to do, that there was something I was here for, a calling—and it was not to just hang out. There was a specific task, as yet unknown, that only I could do, and if I didn’t do it, it would not get done.
I tried some short-term business consulting, but at the time that wasn’t my gig at all. There was no connection, no feeling, no hands-on, real work, no team, no context, no mission. Each company seemed to exist solely to exist. Their missions seemed to be: “Our core competence is to sell as much stuff as possible (it doesn’t matter how or what), so that the people at the top can make as much money as possible by paying the people under them as little as possible.” We are already stuffed with stuff, and here was some more stuff. Where there is real care, real quality, real commitment to good, creative work and artful design skillfully wrought, that’s not stuff; that’s beauty, a crucial and useful aspect of meaning. But when it’s just more stuff, a bit of a product tweak that’s supposed to be a giant leap forward with great fanfare, who needs it? Where’s the calling? Where’s the sense of greater purpose?
Undercurrent
The world of business has become rather cold and heartless and quietly desperate. Over the past thirty years, as corporations have become increasingly devoted to the bottom line, to the exclusion of every other consideration, and jobs have begun moving to the other side of the world, there hasn’t been much alarm in the office. The blue-collar workers downstairs were losing their jobs, but that was okay. That was hand labor, easily replaced by automation and cheap labor overseas. We in the office have education and skills. No problem.
But then something dark started skulking around just outside our peripheral vision, waiting, watching. As consumers, we kept up our daily hunt for the cheapest price—the lower the better. It didn’t matter where or how it was made—whether it was a car we were buying, sheets for our bed, or food for our kids—cheap was always better. You could get breakfast for only $2.99, and that included eggs and potatoes, three kinds of meat, juice, and coffee. Never mind the chickens squeezed so tightly together their beaks had to be burned off so they wouldn’t peck each other to death. We weren’t told about that. Price is important. Never mind the pig shit overflowing into our water supply. They didn’t put that on TV. Price is important. Never mind the cancers caused by our industrial food system. One person’s good deal often means someone else’s raw deal. Price is important.
Then they started coming for us in the office. Programmers in India work a lot cheaper. Price is important. Accountants in Burma have the same computers and programs and can do spreadsheets a lot cheaper. Price is important.
An undercurrent of fear seems to be running through life in the office these days. Anyone’s job could be gone in a flash. Facing the various other crises that we’re becoming aware of is going to take a lot of creativity.
But fear is not conducive to creativity.
How to Live and Work?
People in every time and place have held in common, through their wisdom traditions, some basic beliefs about our lives and work here on Earth. In modern language, they believed that the material world we see, hear, touch, taste and smell is imbued with living spirit that is aware, intentional, and directional—not random, or by chance, or chaotic. They believe that for an individual’s life and work to have meaning and purpose, life itself must have meaning and purpose. They believe that with our freedom of consciousness come responsibilities and duties for the well-being of the whole. They believe that life is a verb—pattern, process, and action— not noun (thing, subject and objects). They believe that myths and dreams are truths that bypass our rational ego or mind, that communicate to us directly from our underlying connected consciousness and link our individual intelligence to foundational wisdom.
Our rational, linear world of business and work needs the balance of spirit and wonder and respect for the unknown. That is where the art and creativity of business comes from. Creative work comes in many forms but is best cultivated in an atmosphere of trust and good cheer. The offices I love working in are fun to be in, even when things may not be looking great for sales, or when the new product isn’t selling up to plan. A great place to work never takes itself too seriously. Offices of good cheer, doing good work, are conducive to the wavebands of meaning that bring epiphanies of true creativity.
Excerpted from to be of use: the seven seeds of meaningful work © 2005 by Dave Smith with permission of the publisher, New World Library.
Sustainable business pioneer Dave Smith has been an executive assistant to Cesar Chavez, a cofounder of Briarpatch Natural Foods Co-op in Menlo Park, California, and cofounder of gardening company Smith & Hawken.
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