A Collection of Private Acts
“I’m calling from Euodia Graphics. That’s E as in Edward, u-o-d-i-a Graphics.”
As my mother made cold call after cold call in our attic, pitching potential clients for my father’s freelance business, I sat quietly in the corner, likely preoccupied with some picture book whose words I could not yet read. This was the 90s and life was simple. Landlines and phone books drove communication the way email and Google rule our lives today. This steady routine, which helped me learn how to spell and how to listen, was my first introduction to the concept of “work.”
In my household, work was flexible, multifaceted, and ever-present. Over the course of my childhood work took place after breakfast during those cold call marathons, 9–5 when my dad was away at his day job, between school lessons where my mom pulled double duty as a homeschool teacher and legal professional, in the evening when she earned extra money at various retail stores, and late at night when my dad hunched over the computer to complete a project.
During my teen years, work was synonymous with desperation. The financial crisis of 2008 terminated my mom’s work-from-home job just weeks before we were scheduled to close on a new house. After my dad quit his job to become a full-time visual artist I accompanied him to art festivals across the country where patrons echoed a chorus of “I love your work.” In this sense, work was a measurement of uniform productivity.
Work did not apply to me personally until I was a teenager, juggling increasingly harder classes and devoting hours of my time to improving some particular skill: golf, algebra, world history. The sentiment that I — a Black female, working-class kid, American — had to work hard pulsed in the background of my every thought. Work slowly evolved from a simple income generator to an ethic, a value, a somehow tangible key to success, or perhaps a rocket ship promising to propel anyone from their unsatisfactory circumstances to an abstract pinnacle.
Work in undergrad meant money for pizza and aching feet after clocking ten-hour shifts at the bookstore. Work post-grad meant hustling online in remote jobs. It also meant constant interrogation while manning the front desk at my father’s frame shop, where customers almost whispered “do you work here?”
I discovered quickly that one of the most common questions we ask of strangers and new acquaintances is “what do you do for work?” It’s a question that elicits the desire to impress or boast, indulge or conceal and in the most socially shameful of cases, hide. But I found our societal obsession with work existing within a 4-walled office or a three-pronged cubical as faulty as it is confining. Partially true in practice, yet unforgiving.
The idea of work is too often confused with employment or even a career. It is most definitely not a job. Whether I was observing my parents doing the work of educator, sports coach, or married couple, my mind formed itself against the backdrop of self-improvement. This meant taking pride in the details and sacrificing hours to gain results. When the pandemic turned bustling office buildings into silent memorials of life as we once knew it—a life I was never truly convinced to lead — I found myself unfazed.
Where others were seeing outside the box of work, I saw no box at all. Work, in my mind, existed more like a broad ranch that extended beyond the horizon and held the possibility of a brighter, larger, or simpler self. Work was a devotion of time, energy and a means to an end — though never purely economic. The end may be paying a bill. It might be raising a respectable child. It could be waking up the next day less anxious than before.
Occupations are a way to survive a capitalistic society, and if we are lucky those occupations might intersect our talents. They may dance like two luminescent butterflies honoring the brilliance of day. They may entangle themselves into something we call a dream job, but they are not “work.”
At the height of last year’s anti-racism movement, so many of us spoke of The Work: who was doing it, who wasn’t, who had more to do, who had yet to begin. As an education professional, I listen to university representatives speak about ways their historically white institutions are “doing the work” of inclusion and accountability. I find myself offering up an obligatory nod of assurance while internally feeling empty. This is not work, either.
At night, I scroll social media and everyone speaks of work: how it defines you, how it’s rude to ask about it, that everything you seek in life–money, flat abs, followers, a loving relationship–takes work. I sigh. The inspirational messages flirt so closely with self-righteousness or shame that I take the lesson, leave the packaging, and close each app ever the more unsatisfied.
This is likely the moment that things fall into place. The exact second, as I push the charger into the receptor of my smartphone, that I understand precisely why my view of work has never aligned with that of modern society. Work should not be something one boasts about or seeks compensation for. Work is the collection of private acts we take to achieve wholeness. The work my parents did to raise me, to keep our family alive, to survive in America was not a work for wages or recognition. It always found time for the important conversations, no matter how many hours or minutes they took. The work was done in the soul, every single day, built upon life’s many lessons, and sought a more whole self than the day before.
In athletics, we say we can tell who’s been putting in work — technically, mentally, or physically — by how they show up to compete. An athlete’s energy and performance reveal what’s happening behind the scenes. Existing as a human is no different, and thus, Living is our Work. Its results are on display with every interaction we initiate. Our thoughts and words must be as intentional and deliberate, persistent and hopeful, as those cold calls my mother made decades ago.
Your work is yours to do alone but like a tree, it is better done in an orchard, planted in fertile soil, tended by loving hands.
You are a tree watering its own roots, bearing distinctive fruit, growing at a unique pace, and blossoming in destined seasons.
Do not let just anyone harvest you before you are ripe.
You still have rings to grow and grow and grow and grow…
