Love's Labor

The first thing I learned about Labor Day was to put away my white clothes until the following Memorial Day. No one ever explained this rule to me, but when I found out it was to distinguish the (white linen) summer leisure class from the (blue collar) year-round working class, I ignored it on principle. When I entered the workforce myself, Labor Day became a day off from work to honor the value of work. Odd logic, but no reason to argue with a long weekend.

After I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it became possible to find purpose in any kind of work, from packing cheese gift baskets for Hickory Farms to typing other people's letters. Regardless of what I was being paid to do, quality was key. When I placed plastic-wrapped cheeses in fake green grass nests, all the labels faced the same way. When I rolled a fresh sheet of letterhead into my IBM Selectric, I kept at it until I had an original with no errors. Call it perfectionism if you like, but there should be a better word when quality is the goal. Excellentism?

Eventually, I learned there were other values at play in calculating the worth of work. "What do you do for a living?" is a question designed to determine where people belong in the caste system of human labor. If you've ever lied to the person sitting next to you on an airplane, you know there's a big difference between what happens when you say, "corporate litigator" and when you say, "septic pump truck driver." The next time I fly, I'm going to try "taxidermist" to see what happens.

Once, while traveling in an Eastern European country, I met a man whose whole body lit up when he talked about the boys’ soccer team he coached. Of course, he liked winning, he said, but what he liked even more was watching boys learn to play to each other's strengths instead of relying only on their own. "What a great job," I said, and he said, "Oh, no, my job is on an assembly line. This I do for love."

The same thing came up in a clergy group I was part of once, which included pastors from every church on the main drag in town. After we had put in the required amount of time trying to impress each other with how hard our jobs were, we talked about what we loved doing on the side. The Methodist was a volunteer fireman. The Baptist was a clown at children's parties. The Catholic taught English as a second language. I raised Bantam chickens. When it was the Presbyterian's turn, he said, "I just realized I don't have a second thing; all I have is my job, but I'm going to fix that. Ask me next time, and I'll tell you what I've started doing for love."

We hear a lot about vocation these days—about finding out what we're truly called to do and doing it to the best of our ability. For some, it's teaching. For some, it's raising a family. For some, it's fixing cars. All that's missing in most of our conversations is the distinction between what we do for a living and what we do for love. I know a handful of people who say there's no distinction—they love what they do, so there's never a day when it feels like work—but surely there are others who must take whatever job is available for pay (sometimes two or three of them), and answer their true calls another way.

There is a word for that too, which belongs right next to vocation: avocation, as in not for pay or professional identity but for true purpose and joy. Both require labor, so there's room in Labor Day for both. The harder work is to show them both the same honor, even if no one else does, and to keep track of where your real worth lies.