What does meaningful work involve?
Home » Blog » Nate Savill » What does meaningful work involve?Blacksmithing apprentice and Good blogger Nate Savill tackles the question of what jobs should bring to our lives—and the lives of those around us.
Forge image by zigazou via Flickr
Anyone who’s been near a forge would have recognised the blacksmiths' tools on the cover of Your Weekend. The picture of blacksmiths' tongs sent me flicking through, expecting a discussion on the rise in popularity of ‘craft'. I found an article by John McCrone which centred mainly on the Oamaru Transition Town group and their preparations for peak oil and other economic or environmental calamities.
My interest was captured by a sidebar containing a list of artisan skills needed for a small community to function in the wake of societal collapse. The list included blacksmiths, thatchers, paint-makers, potters, spinners, weavers, bakers, midwives, historians and even a village idiot. What really hit me was a quote, at the end of the list, from O’Brien explaining “there is no unemployment in this traditional model". It prompted a romantic, heart-warming vision of sharing and co-dependence—a society where all work was valued and no one was left out.
[There is] a need for work that engages the body and carries meaning, self-reliance and creativity
Interestingly, the following week’s Your Weekend magazine carried a piece by Margie Thomson which featured Matt Crawford’s book, 'Shop Class as Soulcraft'. The article briefly outlines Crawford’s journey from life as a disillusioned political philosopher to fulfilment as a motorcycle mechanic. What I get from Crawford in the article (I haven’t read the book and much of the article looks at trades in NZ), is a strong sense of the need for work that engages the body and carries meaning, self-reliance and creativity.
Both articles describe a concept of work which Studs Terkel (who documented working class America in the 70’s) calls an exercise in “daily meaning as well as daily bread". Also highlighted is the the necessity of relationships to create this sense of meaning within community and within the self. They’re themes I’ve been thinking about a lot, and which are relevant to the blacksmith past and present.
Better work should mean happier, flourishing selves and better relationships with other people and the world at large
I am struck by the depth within the word relationship; it holds so much power and so much fragility. It brings to mind the concepts of Deep Ecology, which promotes the intimate connectivity of all living things—a near infinite web of deeply interconnected, fragile relationships. Ecosystems within ecosystems, bodies within bodies, universes within universes. Damage to one strand is damage to all; climate change might be the unfortunate example which proves this theory correct. Bearing this in mind, better work should mean happier, flourishing selves and better relationships with other people and the world at large.
Someone said that work “ennobles and enlivens", but “a job is something which is endured". Our society’s concept of work and prosperity seems to pump out depression, illness, greed, environmental catastrophe and dishonesty as fast as the products it sells us. The current oil spill is a great example. Daily I am surrounded by people who view a job as a sentence, a necessary evil, a forty-year grind with hope for a better life at the end. It seems that we need to reimagine what work might look like and ask some serious questions of ourselves and our values.
It seems that we need to reimagine what work might look like and ask some serious questions of ourselves and our values
I hope ‘good’ work, the type that Crawford espouses, would change priorities, and help us befriend and demystify a world we often try to dominate. It makes me think about hands, and work that draws out our creativity while acknowledging the whole person and our relationship to the earth, without which we have nothing. It makes me think of the ritual and celebration which accompanied ‘work’ in many pre-industrialised cultures (and still does in some) and bound communities together. It makes me think of good things!
In an old National Geographic, I found a reflection by Native American writer N. Scott Momaday on a day's planting. In his words are housed feelings which leave me yearning and breathless:
I have not forgotten that day, nor shall I forget it. I remember the warm earth of the fields, the smooth texture of seeds in my hands, and the brown water moving slowly and irresistably among the rows. Above all I remember the spirit in which the procession was made, the work was done and the feasting was enjoyed. It was a spirit of communion, of the life of each man in relation to the planet and of the infinite distance and silence in which it moves. We made, in concert, an appropriate expression of that spirit…
