Image: A Room with Two Views by Flickr user J.B. Kochanie (yes, that’s me)

One day I found a mouse caught in a trap. With her leg pinned to the wooden plank by a bar of steel, the mouse had crawled twelve feet across a stone floor. She tried to escape into a small gap in a concrete wall, a passageway between the world of bright lights, whirring machines, heat and food to the dark hidden world of narrow spaces, cold and blessed quiet. The trap was too big to pull through the gap, so the mouse remained there — half in one world, half in the other — until Death or His agent, in the form of this author, arrived on the scene.

It occurred to me that the mouse with her leg caught in the the trap was the perfect metaphor for my failed attempts to balance work and life.

If you expected me to say that the trap represented “marriage” or “mortgage,” the metaphor would be just as apt for work, money, and love are interrelated. Mortgage and marriage “go together just like a horse and carriage,” to paraphrase the lyrics of the old song. Intoxicated with love and the validation we have been seeking since childhood, we become the emotional big spenders, making big plans and life-long commitments. Big plans per se are not bad. I could argue that those big dreams urged me to pursue a list of accomplishments that I would not have thought possible when I was a child. But everything has its price and the currency demanded, in one form or another, is Time which is precious because our share is finite.

While work is an essential part of our existence, ensuring that our families are clothed and fed, work rarely feeds our souls. Even if we are employed by a charitable organization dedicated to eliminating poverty or illiteracy, we will grow weary of the tedium of staff meetings, deadlines, and reports. If we developed the unfortunate habit of checking our email during the evening commute, we may have given up the few minutes of quiet before returning home to family and chores. Perhaps we avoid those quiet moments because if we stopped being busy, we would realize what drones we had become, how many promises to ourselves and others we had broken in the name of work.

In his book, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, poet David Whyte describes the effect of these broken promises.

Some time ago, at AT&T, I found myself working with a roomful of particularly thoughtful managers. We were looking at the way human beings find it necessary to sacrifice their own sacred desires on the altar of work and success. Out of this a woman wrote the following lines. She read them slowly from the back of the room, unaware how stricken we all were by the silence she created:

Ten years ago
I turned my faced for a moment

and it became my life.

Five years ago, if anyone had asked me if I read blogs, I would have answered with an emphatic, “No.” With my workload, I found it difficult to find the time and energy to write or read for pleasure. Nor did I want to waste that time reading someone else’s litany of complaints about work and life. Looking back, that is exactly what I did need — reading someone’s else’s words — because it may have resuscitated my own neglected writing. Neglect is dangerous because it is an easy first step to being silent, being voiceless.

In his essay, The Longing: the Web and the Return of Voice, David Weinberger explains how readily we allow ourselves to be silenced.

A managed environment requires behavior from us that we accept as inevitable although, of course, it is really mandatory only because it is mandated.

It requires this by stressing the virtue of “professionalism.” To a large degree, that translates as being voiceless. Professionals not only act according to a canon of ethics but also dress like other professionals (one eccentricity per person is permitted — a garish tie, perhaps, or a funky necklace), decorate their cubicles with nothing more disturbing than a Dilbert (formerly Far Side) cartoon, sit up straight at committee meetings, don’t “undermine the authority” (i.e., be smarter than) their superiors, make idle chatter only about a narrow range of “safe” topics, don’t curse, don’t mention God, never let on whether they’re going to shit or pee, make absolutely no reference to being sexual (exceptions made for male executives after the new secretary has left the room) and successfully “manage” their home life so that it never intrudes unexpectedly into their business life.

Most of us don’t mind doing this. Like Sartre’s waiter, we actually sort of enjoy it. It’s like playing grownup. Having extremist political banners hung in cubicles or having to listen to someone talk about his spiritual commitments or sex life would simply be distracting. Disturbing, actually.

And yet … we feel resentment.

...Just about all the concessions we make to work in a well-run, non-disturbing, secure, predictably successful, managed environment have to do with giving up our voice.

Nothing is more intimately a part of who we are than our voice. It expresses what we think and feel. It is an amalgam of the voluntary and involuntary. It gives style and shape to content. It subtends the most public and the most private. It is what we withhold at the moments of greatest significance.

Our voice is our strongest, most direct expression of who we are. Our voice is expressed in our words, our tone, our body language, our visible enthusiasms.

Management is a powerful force, part of a larger life-scheme that promises us health, peace, prosperity, calm and no surprises in every aspect of our lives, from health to wealth to good weather and moderately heated coffee from McDonalds. We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable. This assault is literal as well as metaphoric. It shows itself in the embarrassment over having an accent, in the reduction of political thought to two identical parties, in the lust for buzzwords and catchphrases, yadda yadda yadda (and, of course, in the use of the phrase “yadda yadda yadda”).

It is only the force of our regret at having lived in this bargain that explains the power of our longing for the Web.

You can read the entire essay by David Weinberger here..

Five years ago, I was sick to death of professionalism. I had become so professional I was voiceless. What I needed was to read the words of others such as the wise, pleasure-loving Minx:

I compromise my artistic soul so that I can afford to live — but I have great difficulty living with said compromise. Hence this blog.

So I began to read the blogs I previously had scorned. After a time, I dared to submit a comment. One blog in particular helped me to regain my voice. It is the blog which you are reading now.

Sungold of Kittywampus has called bloggers the adjunct professors of the media, and I agree. It takes discipline and dedication to inform and inspire on a daily basis, especially when the basement floods, the kids are sick, and you can’t find pants that fit.

So if you have not done so already, please cast your vote for Figleaf as the Bloggers’ Choice Hottest Daddy Blogger (the badge in the sidebar will take you to the site) and for Sungold as the Hottest Mommy Blogger.

Reference:
David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, published by Currency Books (a division of Doubleday), ISBN 0-385-42350-0, pp.230-231.