Imagine the Inherent Beauty of Work
And if that's too much, imagine swimming into the beauty of a perfect freestyle
“The mind that is not baffled is not employed. ” — Wendell Berry
About once a week I coach my Masters swim group. On occasion—and maybe because I like to tell people what to do make helpful suggestions, I offer stroke tips. It’s a bit cheeky of me because I’m not a technique expert. So I Google some easy-to-grasp tips, like keeping the elbows high during freestyle, and not over-reaching upon entry—all in order to help the swimmers achieve a very important long-term goal: swim till they’re 100.
The other morning I felt all out of ideas (crazy because there’s no limit!), and gave a short freestyle set of Beautiful Swimming. That was it. Maybe it’s all this Beauty talk that’s going on in the salons, but I had a flash of an idea. I encouraged the swimmers to impersonalize their freestyle form. Instead of thinking about “my beautiful freestyle,” or “how do I get my body moving more fluidly” I asked them to consider something else: the inherent and persistent beauty of the freestyle stroke.
In other words: Imagine that the freestyle’s beauty already exists, and instead of struggling to bring beauty and coherence into your stroke, imagine swimming into the beautiful, coherent stroke that is already there.
You don’t have to be a swimmer to practice this. Imagine the inherently delicious dinner, or the already perfect scarf you’re going to knit, the bodacious run that’s already there, the rich conversation always present. All of these not made by you but already there for you to find your way into them.
I know, this is very conceptual and weird. Shall we continue?
What if you applied this inherent existing beauty to work?
Oh, let’s! I did it just this week with a client who’s disgruntled at work. Many people are disgruntled by their jobs, and baffled by What to Do, and making their bafflement a problem. What if it weren’t? What if the bafflement is a necessary and beautiful part of work, but we’re seeing it all wrong because we’re obsessed with KNOWING?
Imagine the impersonal and even Beautiful nature of this thing we call w-o-r-k. The inherent beauty of a c-a-r-e-e-r or having a job. That all work is beautiful, no matter if you’re driving a garbage truck or choreographing a modern dance. This beauty has nothing to do with you, or me, or those a-holes over there, those show-offs over here. Instead, the beauty is like a galaxy in which w-o-r-k exists. It’s this enormity that holds all “jobs.” And like the freestyle stroke, work already holds an inherent beauty that has nothing to do with the singularity of you or me. It’s not my work or your work, it’s simply work. Impersonal, energetic, and beautifully meaningless.
Do I sound crazy?
The swimmers probably thought I was a bit of a nutter with my beauty talk.
But think about it. Working our way into the inherent beauty of work is just another way to expand our capacity for all things that arise on the job, and impersonalizing the experience. There is so much to appreciate about w-o-r-k, not just the money and health benefits and people with whom you can grab coffee, share a laugh, feel a sense of belonging, but it’s a space we get to inhabit (metaphorically of course) to simply express all our humanness and crazy funky shit. Yahoo!
So I dare you, invite you, ask you to consider the inherent, existing beauty of work, to see if it helps you to loosen some painful beliefs about what your work is, or how it’s going.
And if you want to talk more about this crazy notion of beauty, work, and expanding capacity, join the Beauty at Work salon. It starts in January. Email me if you’re interested. I’d love to have you. It’s a beautiful space, can you see it?
Have fun being befuddled this week. You’re not supposed to KNOW. Closing off with a little Mary O.
GO DOWN TO THE SHORE
by Mary OliverI go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.