What We Subconsciously Learn About Work and Rest
I have been thinking a lot about rest. I’m 45. I have been working since I was 11 but learning and receiving messages and energy about work since before I was born.
Recently I learned more about my birth story.
When my mother was pregnant with me she doubled up on work right up until she gave birth. She also carried me on her back when she returned to work during the first year of my life. My mom worked a range of different service jobs when she arrived in the United States -- nanny, hotel worker, private home cleaning, and catering. This is back-breaking work that often comes without a social, cultural, or economic lens for well-being.
Now multiply this one experience across a diaspora of vulnerable women and their children and families.
Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Immigrant women in these jobs face a lack of access to health resources and ways to resolve inner emotions. Their experiences compound in the body, leading to physical and emotional issues. It would be easy to externalize and say this is the fault of a specific person or group of people. But that wouldn’t be true. Mostly this is rooted in a society where work is the center of life and those who work “legitimately” are highly valued.
I keep wondering whether work should be the center of the lives of our children.
I can’t answer that for you.
I can only say that the value of a woman or gender nonconforming person has been largely shaped in the shadow of a man’s industriousness in white-collar work. The more you work and achieve academically and in white-collar jobs, the more value you have in society. Historically, the women’s movement built up this narrative and encouraged women to break the glass ceiling to sit at the table with CEOs that also believed in this kind of industriousness narrative.
Just below that ceiling women of color and others have been holding up the entire economy consistently for centuries without rest, dignity, or a time for emotional resolve. And their children and grandchildren have inherited all the narratives, emotions, and unresolved conditions of those experiences. They continue to look up at the glass ceiling waiting for it to break when it could shatter by moving our collective gaze and our interest somewhere else.
What should our work be geared towards?
I believe we should question what kinds of work we are contributing towards and who or what the work is benefiting. Our greatest power is in making choices around our role in the future of work. We choose our career and what matters in this world. In conversations between folks of color, we often discuss getting access to the quality of life we all want under the existing system. We rarely discuss what and how we are prepared to get there outside of a system that doesn’t love, protect or honor us or the planet.
What if we had a movement that included the well-being of the people and the planet at the center of our lives? What role work and professions would take?
This question should be uncomfortable because it forces us to look at our “achievements” and determine whether they are helping our society move in the right direction. Our society has largely been constructed around making others compete, grow and activate wealth at any cost. By moving our gaze towards the repair of an ailing planet and its most vulnerable and impacted people, we move our attention away from overconsumption and into sustainability and protection of our most precious kin.
So where do we start?
Always start at home.
To have a society centered on our well-being, we might have to look away from the neverending growth economy and each give up some ways of being to rediscover ourselves in a new light. Giving up a resource, idea, or title is just the end of a work-centered society. It is not the end of us. What if something new and not yet spoken is waiting for us?
Don’t wait for someone to tell you how to reflect on whether work should be the center.
On your own, with your family, or with a group of people you care for, sit down and reflect on the following:
What is my history and my parents'/ caregivers’ history with work?
How has centering worked served my biological or chosen family?
How has centering work served the vision my community has for wellbeing?
What has centering work meant for actualizing justice, healing, and liberation?
If I could center something other than work at this time in my life, what might that be, even if temporary?
Turn to a young person in your life and ask them, what should be at the center of society and life?
Take a walk in nature and sit by a tree or observe a flower. If this plant could speak, what would it tell you is the center of life?
Share your comments below, and invite your community to read this piece.
My coaching program, Wild Dreams, is taking new shape as a self-paced course for the Fall/Winter 2022 season. If you are looking for the tools to reimagine rest, purpose, and what the future holds for you, I invite you to sign up for the waitlist to learn more as we gear up for the launch of this course.