July 2006 | BackWords
To Be Or To Do?
Swamps, septic tanks and the myth of right livelihood
By Kim Risburg
I’ve always admired and envied those few people who grow up knowing what their life’s work will be. You know the types. They come out of the womb and casually ask the attending doctor for a guitar or a paintbrush or a computer, and then they embark on the business of creating brilliant, successful careers. Most of us aren’t so lucky. We stumble around for a while, and if we’re fortunate, we eventually land on something we like.
I’m a stumbler myself, having invested quite a few years in discovering, by the process of elimination, what sort of jobs I’m not suited for. Now that I’ve settled happily into freelance work, I’m incredibly grateful to be doing something I enjoy. Still, I’m not convinced that a job, no matter how wonderful, can hold the answer to any sort of existential question.
The idea of “right livelihood” has always appealed to me, but for many years I defined the concept differently than I do now. I used to think right livelihood meant that there is one particular job or profession each individual is uniquely destined for, and it’s his or her mission to find that course, and live happily ever after. But that interpretation no longer sits well with me. I’m learning that the “right” comes from how you do a job, not what sort of job you do.
I had a job as a cashier once, and I hated it. I hated being on my feet and I hated having to constantly smile at customers. My math skills are such that no one should let me near a cash register. Because of my particular bias, I often looked upon cashiers with pity. Then one day, I encountered a cashier who, as she cheerfully bagged my groceries, told me how much she loved her profession and how she felt lucky to come to work each day. Now, that’s right livelihood.
I grew up watching my dad trudge off to a desk job each morning that he clearly did not enjoy. Though many would envy him for owning a successful business, he did not have right livelihood. My mom, on the other hand, was perfectly content to work a relatively low-paying clerical job at an insurance company. She had right livelihood.
I recently caught a public radio interview with Mike Rowe, host of a Discovery Channel show called Dirty Jobs. He gave some pretty detailed accounts (I’ll spare you the graphic stuff) of some of the typical careers he profiles in his shows—jobs that most of us would consider unbearably vile, such as sexing baby chicks on an assembly line or retrieving golf balls from swamps. And he noted that, surprisingly, lots of people who do these jobs claim to like them. The happy hard workers he’s encountered include cheerful members of an Ohio road-kill clean-up crew, and a former psychiatrist who walked away from a thriving practice to become—of all things—a septic tank cleaner. (When asked why he made the change, he replied without skipping a beat: “I was tired of dealing with other people’s shit.”)
During the last hundred years or so, as our country’s sturdy fabric of local communities and neighborhood cultures has unraveled, we’ve lost with it the necessary separation between work and life. When we can’t find a sense of belonging within a community, we seek it in our work. Likewise, we attempt to find the answers to life’s bigger questions not at an altar or in a forest, but in our jobs. Work has ceased to become a means to an end. Instead, it has become an end. You meet someone at a party and the first thing he asks is, “What do you do?” (A friend of mine who waits tables for a living tells me he likes to make up answers to that question, just for fun. The last time he was asked, it was by a teller at a bank where he was depositing a large roll of cash. He told her that he was a professional dancer, raising his arms over his head and giving her a couple of lascivious hip swivels for good measure.)
When I look back at the many office jobs I’ve had and hated, I can see that the work itself wasn’t the problem. When I was struggling through it, I let my identity get caught up in the jobs. I was just a clerical worker, and therefore unworthy of life’s bounties. The funny thing is, these days I find myself doing the same types of tasks I used to do when I was sitting at a cubicle from nine to five, and loving it. I could find plenty of reasons to complain about my current job, but I’m not going to walk that road again. I let work be work, and life be life. Septic tanks included.
Kim Risburg is a freelance writer in Nashville, Tennessee.
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