Working for a Living

I am at my desk early today, with a moment to sit quietly and listen to the question. Is there a craftsmanlike way of working that is available not only to the worker in his workshop but to the worker wherever he works, whatever his work is—in a factory or bank, in an executive office or houseful of children; even here in a noisy advertising agency? 

Today I want to know for myself if there is still a way of working that would not only support me physically but would also support this inner hunger that I feel now: a hunger actually to be here at my job, more awake, instead of dreaming at it, swept along from one minor crisis to the next, from paycheck to paycheck. 

The New York drama critic Walter Kerr seems to be speaking my thoughts when, in The Decline of Pleasure, he writes, “The work we are doing is more or less the work we meant to do in life [but] it does not yield us the feeling of accomplishment we had expected . . . If I were required to put into a single sentence my own explanation of the state of our hearts, heads, and nerves, I would do it this way: we are vaguely wretched because we are leading half-lives, halfheartedly, and with only one-half of our minds actively engaged in making contact with the universe about us.” 

This is part of my concern right now: this half-heartedness, half-mindedness with which I live my one and only life. It seems related to the triviality of the work I do, and I would like to place the blame for my dissatisfaction squarely there. I begin to dream about a fulfilling work: in a hospital perhaps; in some use of myself that would satisfy this hunger. Still, what I am doing is the work at hand. It is my livelihood; it needs doing. I would wish to find a way to attend to it more creatively, or at least more carefully, so that it felt more like an exchange: a giving as well as a taking. 

I remember the story of two Zen monks, both prodigious smokers. Concerned about the question of smoking during their prayer time, they agreed to consult their superiors. While one received a stern reprimand from his abbot, the other was given a pat of encouragement. The unlucky one, greatly puzzled, asked his friend exactly how he had framed his question. “I asked,” the second monk replied, “whether it was permissible to pray while smoking.” 

Maybe this is the kind of care my work needs. To pray while typing, while answering the phone—would it require a very different way of praying; a way that Zen monks must come to through their training—something like that wordless beseeching one discovers in trying to guide a car along an icy road or in performing any exacting piece of work under all but impossible conditions?

I once looked up the origin of the word “prayer” and found its root is in the Latin precarius—“obtained by entreaty,” hence implying uncertainty, risk. The plain truth is that in my usual way of working I feel nothing precarious or risky. Nothing is really at stake. Today, for reasons I don’t understand, I feel that something vast and mysterious is at stake, something known only to me, important only to me. I can only call it my being. It’s as if my usual way of working serves to sever me from my me-ness, from this new and fragile sense of myself at this typewriter right now. 

Before I can go any further with a study of my own work, perhaps I need to ponder the meaning of work in general—in other times as well as in our own—and as I ponder. I sense a kinship between the words “work” and “worship.” I begin to suspect that man is physically organized in exactly the way he is, just so that he will need to work in order to live; and it seems possible that the substance required for his own transformation and for the maintenance of the universe is created as a direct result of his work. 

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” God told Adam, and if man did not actually need to work to feed, shelter, and clothe himself, actually in order to survive, perhaps this essential substance, whatever it is, would never be created. Perhaps, since man was created precisely as he is—exactly this kind of breathing, digesting, thinking, feeling organism—there is a precisely ordered way for him to work and to live in order to serve a universal purpose. 

For me this is a fresh thought, this idea that it is man-at-work that serves the universe in a special way; and it sheds new light on the possible meaning of the way of the craftsman. However distracted the cathedral builders must have been, upon occasion, from the spiritual aspect of their work (for surely illness, family problems, all the continuing vagaries of the human condition beset these men as they do us), their inner hunger must have been fed by their way of working, a way indicated by their priests and guild masters who constantly reminded them that they were in the service of something higher, that their work was their means of serving and not an end in itself. 

With what heart they must have worked then, entrusting themselves to this higher authority!—this same “heart,” perhaps, that set the golden harp (surely a symbol of joy in work) side by side with the tools of gold that were unearthed by archaeologists in the Sumerian city of Ur. The dweller in a golden age or an age of faith seems to have understood that he was living a kind of double life, one in the visible world and one in the invisible. Traditional man was apparently taught from infancy that all that he manifested in his everyday living vibrated invisibly in another dimension and that it was his voluntary attempts to participate in his hidden dimension that set him apart from other living creatures—that made him, in fact, a transformer, a Man.

With what heart they must have worked then, entrusting themselves to this higher authority!

But today where are such teachers? Where are our priests? Our wise men? I try now to imagine what it would be like to be a member of a guild; to be an apprentice in a workshop at the head of which was a master in the original sense of the word: a man whose craft was truly his own, in his hands and heart and in his bones; a man who could impart the inner as well as the outer element of this craft to those working under him, not just by words and example, but by his very presence. 

Guild members, we are told, would begin their day with the master in prayer to the guild’s patron saint before turning to the work, and prayers of one kind or another punctuated the whole day. Throughout the day there was the closeness of man to man, the sense of one another’s existence, and the exchange between the experienced workers and the novices: the meeting of eyes, the showing and the watching, the speaking and the listening. How different from the usual factories and workplaces of today, where little is “handed” from man to man, where eyes rarely meet, and the human voice cannot always rise above the noise of machinery; where men in their isolation from one another begin to feel a kinship only with their particular machine—a truck driver with his truck, a printer with his press, even a copywriter with her typewriter. 

There is an instant now in which I feel the limitation of this kind of kinship, and I wonder how we ever lost touch with one another and with our sacred heritage. How did we become separated from that other dimension in which our forebears felt their common humanity and the common authority for their lives? Our discontent as workers today must stem from this incredible lapse: this mass forgetfulness that we are under any authority higher than that of our boss, whether he be the factory foreman, the president of the company, or oneself. 

Oh, for the ordered structure of the guild workshop! The strong clear voice of the master “re-minding” me, in the real sense of that word, to return to the silence. So many of the rituals of the traditional societies must have been created for just this call to inner silence. The beating of drums, the tolling of the Angelus, the sounding of the ram’s horn, the repetition of the sacred syllables in whatever language, the ceremonial dances—all these mysterious activities that until this moment have appeared to me like so many quaint customs must have been designed for just this reminding. And at this moment I am shocked to discover the life going on inside me: the breath coming and going; the amazing heartbeat. I am here; the thought is here; and a kind of feeling. I am here in this very ordinary place with a minute, mundane advertisement to write, but it is my work and it requires me. 

What I constantly forget is that I always have my place. It is here exactly where I am. Where else could it be? Here is this life that is uniquely mine, one whole unit of creation that is entirely my place and my responsibility. 

I feel a great desire not to lose touch with this feeling-thought that is with me this morning. I have felt it before: a wishing for something more for myself or from myself. Is there a master in me to whom I can turn, if—like people in fairy tales—I can wish hard enough? I don’t know, but something I have read comes alive for me now: “Wood and stone will teach me what cannot be heard from the master’s teaching.” 

I have no wood or stone, but I have my job; that is my reality for now. “To take what there is and use it,” Henry James wrote many years ago, “without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that—this doubtless is the right way to live.” A thought from Father Robert Capon’s writing stirs vigorously in me. “Adam,” he wrote, and he was speaking of twentieth-century Adam, of the likes of you and me, “is the priest of Creation. His truest work is to offer up reality itself, not just a headful of abstractions about it.” 

It seems as if it could be right here, even in this super-automated, super-franchised, polluted, synthetic age, that I might begin my apprenticeship; right here, now, in this attitude of seeing what is. Perhaps this is the elusive way of working that makes all the difference between the craftsman and the slave—just this reordering of my energies because I want to work this way, because I need to, because I must. The authority is still there. We are not forgotten in spite of our forgetfulness, for natural laws, unlike the ordinances of temporal authority, are never changing. It is the very constancy of these laws that offers us a challenge and a hope. It leaves something up to me; it is for me to seek a way to reconnect with these laws. It is even an obligation, if Simone Weil was right in saying that it is the work of our age to create a civilization “founded upon the spiritual nature of work.” 

Perhaps it would be just in a daily lifelong attitude of “seeing” that the noisy, chaotic activity I call my job could become a support for my attention instead of a distraction. Perhaps, if I attend to the reality that is in front of me moment by moment—phone, machine, pencil, boss, coffee—constantly failing, accepting to fail and to begin again—this perfectly ordinary work I do might become extraordinary work, might even become my craft. 

The phone is ringing now. The first of my co-workers has arrived and is answering it. The question I began with remains: 

Is there a way of working that would support this need I feel actually to be here at my work?

The answer, I am sure, is not to be found in my head or in any book, but quite simply in an ever-deepening of the question itself. 

I confront the outline I left on my desk last Friday, and I get to work.

♦

Adapted from The Ordinary Magic of Meditation © 2026 edited by John Welwood. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com