This I did, cutting back my university teaching schedule to half time, giving up committees and projects, asking for an extension on a pending book deadline. The first and most dramatic effect of all this scaling back was on the family budget; suddenly, we had to learn to live on much less.
Yet more difficult than the financial hit was the emotional one. I was slowly, deliberately giving up my place in the center of things, my spot in the busy hub. I, a healthy middle-aged person, was disengaging for no apparent reason, walking away from new challenges at the very time I should have been pursuing them with even greater vigor. On certain occasions I caught a look of moral disapproval in a colleague’s eyes. This inevitably triggered self-doubt, which was lurking just beneath the surface.
However, there were also surprising rewards in this new way of life. One day, for example, on my first summer off in years, I was out weeding the garden and realized that, between the warm sun on my back, the smell of the earth, the singing of birds, I was having a great time. Yet how many years had I performed this particular chore in a dutiful, grudging way, racing against time so as to get back to something “more important”?
Better yet, this was a job I’d never have to give up; the university might let me go, my publisher abandon me, but there would always be weeds. The thought made me straighten up, rub my back, and laugh. Could there be a more anonymous task? One less calculated to win me straight A's, glory, and fame? I looked around me; aside from three crows intently watching everything I did, the admiring audience I’d been playing to since kindergarten had long since disappeared. I was a nameless middle-aged woman in an old straw hat, sore of back and dirty of hands — not exactly the world-beater I’d imagined I might someday be.
Still, I was doing good work; this was indubitably “right livelihood,” as the Buddhists would call it. I glanced over at the crows, who were watching me hungrily. This was work at its most basic level. Turning the soil, planting the seeds, pulling the weeds, holding the crows at bay. How many generations of human beings have devoted whole lives to these tasks?
I thought of all the other anonymous chores out there: cooking, cleaning, building, transporting, record-keeping, documenting, filing, nursing, drilling, digging, navigating, piloting, bulldozing. Another weed-inspired revelation: the world is not sustained by the achievers.
Making work into an idol, tying my sense of self-worth to my “productivity,” had in essence enslaved me to an endless cycle of proving myself in the professional realm. Worse, nothing I did was ever enough; other strivers like me were always raising the bar. Yet as St. Paul reminds the Galatians, “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”
In our competitive society, work can easily become that yoke if we do not learn to separate it from the accolades and financial rewards it brings us. When the demon of ambition is vanquished, however, we are freed up to love in a way we cannot when others are merely frustrating interruptions in our busy schedules. More, we are released into the possibility of vocation, of discovering what it is we were really meant to do with our lives.
Then, as St. Paul assures his disciple Timothy, we can “present ourselves as acceptable to God, a workman who causes no disgrace.” Then we can claim the “spiritual Sabbath” that St. Aelred of Rievaulx calls “rest to the soul, peace to the heart, quiet to the mind.”
Paula Huston’s most recent book is The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyola, 2003). She is also co-editor and a contributing essayist for Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments (Dutton, 2000). A National Endowment of the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing, she is the author of a novel, Daughters of Song (Random House, 1995) and numerous short stories. She is married, has four children, and is a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate. For more information, visit her website at www.paulahuston.com.
(This article was excerpted from The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life by Paula Huston (Loyola Press, 2003). Reprinted with permission of Loyola Press. To order copies of this book, call 1-800-621-1008 or visit www.loyolabooks.org.)
