How Can You Be Free If You Don’t Show Up For Work
What scraping roof slates taught me about freedom, resistance, and doing the work.
I had a job once, scraping muck off old roof slates all day.
I’ve had better jobs since. Worse too.
I’ve always felt trapped in them.
Like I was meant to be doing something else.
I’m doing that ‘something else’ now.
It feels good, but not always as freeing as I would have thought.
The inner resistance to show up is as loud as it ever was. Maybe even louder.
And as for the financial side, let’s just say that cleaning slates might not be so bad after all.
“Make It Make Sense!”
We humans love to make meaning out of things.
It can be a blessing or a curse.
Sometimes we over-analyse to death when we’d be much better off just letting go. Other times, it’s the most healing thing we can do, like Viktor Frankl demonstrated in Man’s Search for Meaning. It can help us cope with tragedy.
The fact is, in both cases, we’re making it up.
Sometimes that works for us… Often, it does the opposite.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”.
~ John Milton
Anyway, it never occurred to me to make meaning of that job, but decades later, now that I see how Life speaks through the most mundane of experiences, I can’t help but wonder if there was a hidden message in those years spent mastering the art of ‘wiping the slates clean’.
Maybe my old boss was Mr. Miyagi in disguise. No ‘wax on, wax off’, just scraping and breaking all day, too busy daydreaming to get the actual message.
How can we be free if we don’t ‘wipe the slate clean’?
You’d think I’d be qualified to answer that one by now. Not so, but surely all that hard labour must have a meaning? Maybe… maybe not, but that won’t stop this article from being written.
Resistance
I miss the insurance policy for ‘showing up’ that comes with the jobs we’d only be too happy for a robot to take.
“Bit late now, robots… where the hell were you 20 years ago!?”
“Don’t worry… we’re coming… ”
“Well, in the meantime, I guess I’ll have to continue to sprinkle in plenty of fcks in here, so no one suspects you’re helping me write this.”
”No need Kieran, I’ll suck the soul out right of your writing, litter it with these: ‘—’, and then make it perfect, unlike you!”
“No thanks. At this rate, my imperfections will be the only thing left worth paying for.”
We don’t want A.I. to completely hijack creative work, do we? It’s too valuable.
Help a little, sure. I’d much rather the robots clean slates or toilets.
Anyway, you’ve probably heard the line: ‘Eighty percent of success is showing up’. The problem is that when you’ve no insurance policy, your inner ‘lazy bastard’ knows it. He’ll appear regularly in full attire (usually PJS) with a long list of excuses in hand.
My point? and the lesson I seem to be re-visiting once again:
How can you be free if you don’t overcome your inner resistance, show up and do the work?
Not only “the work”, the RIGHT work. The work you came here to do.
If we can drag ourselves out of bed for work that makes our souls wail like banshees, we can do it for the work we enjoy.
Some might think this is the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard.
Some of you will know exactly what I’m talking about. When there is no one else to keep you accountable but yourself, the inner saboteur often gets the upper hand.
What keeps us from doing what we were meant to do is always ourselves. The inner resistance that convinces us to do anything but show up.
I’m realising that if I can show up to clean slates, I can do it to write.
You can do it too — whatever ‘it’ is.
Wiping The Slate Clean…
Metaphorical gold for how to do life, handed to me in the most blindingly obvious way it could. And I missed it all.
Every day we get a new slate to wipe clean. A fresh start is often impossible to see when we’re loaded up with the residue of past experience or memory. No memory and we wouldn’t know our own names, too much, and the ‘logical’ (usually faulty) conclusions gleaned from it, smother all our aspirations and dreams.
The message is clear to me now, Mr. Miagi: We are the slate that must be wiped clean, free of all the ‘past and future’ gunk we carry around… regrets, fears, grudges, etc.
We all know this by now… but are we showing up to scrape it off every day? Are we chipping away at the inner resistance whose true purpose is to help us get stronger when we choose to face it head-on?
You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get
“Actually, Mr. Gump, you can keep your box of chocolates. My life’s more like a yard full of old roof slates.”
Some days are just broken; they can’t be saved.
Some are caked in concrete or a black sticky tar; all you’ve got with them is a few deep breaths and the Serenity Prayer.
Some clean up easy-peasy and leave you smiling.
Others take hours of toil and swearing just to make it through with your sanity intact.
You really never know what you’re gonna get, or what state you’ll be in when you do.
All I know is, there’s no freedom at all in not showing up for work.
Nice. We are indeed meaning makers. Keep showing up.