glass balls, rubber toads
I was at the dentist this morning and while the receptionist was on the phone and I waiting to pay my check up fee I read one of those A4 print-outs of motivational text you often see pinned up on an office noticeboard. The receptionist was on the phone quite a while (apparantly the caller was in some pain and seeking the first available appointment), so I read the notice several times. It went something like this:
'Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. They are named - work, family, health, friends and integrity and you're keeping all of these in the air. Eventually you understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends and integrity - are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. Understand this and you will have the beginning of balance in your life.'
This stuck in my mind, I suppose because I am dealing with what feels like a pretty punishing workload myself. I puzzled over its wisdom. Is it really the case that the work 'ball' will bounce back if dropped, in the current economic climate? Is this really the experience of people who have to take time out from their profession or current job for purposes of family or health? And isn't it the case that a supportive and responsive 'family', however large or small, or indeed a set of friends, would understand if you needed to concentrate your limited resources to push a work project throughto completion? When it comes to health, I'm more convinced that it's important to keep this ball in the air, as safe from harm as possible. Illness and exhaustion are horrible and can indeed lead to disease or accident serious enough to scuff or shatter. Ironically enough this is a ball that a lot of people think it's ok, virtuous even, to let slip on a more than occasional basis. And integrity- what kind of a concept is this? Can you be certain that integrity is such an inflexible, inelastic concept? Maybe so, particularly if there's a temptation to do anything illegal. Still - the idea that you can't make reparation for inevitable slips, hesitancies, acts of cowardice or panic - rather uncomfortable. We grow from mistakes and integrity is surely something we should feel we can regain and/ or work towards. That old idea of forgiveness and redemption.
Anyway, I did a bit of research on this idea of juggling balls and life aspects, and curiously, came up with several different versions of the 'parable' - in one it wasn't work which was the rubber ball at all, but all the others, barring family, if you are female (it was some kind of rather conservative church website). On another - not a church website at all - the 'integrity' ball was substitued by a 'spirit' ball. By this I assumed was meant spirituality in a wider sense. I preferred this, although again spirituality is something that many people turn to intermittently or (re)discover at some stages of life.
I suppose the whole metaphor is a pretty modern one. Dynamic, constantly needing attention to keep the whole cycle going. Life as a portioned-out, perpetually sustained performance. The balance, the equilibrium that can be achieved by best-conceptualisation of the balls, isn't a restful one but instead could at any time be lost through a slip of hand or eye. You can get a kind of exhilaration from it but there's not much time for forward planning or a sense of achievement. And yes, I know I'm expecting too much of a simple image, but even so -- one gets a sense of the underlying, perpetual urgency of life.
Work - Philip Larkin called it a toad:
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Working as a university librarian, he saw other professions - lecturers among them - as living much more lightly, 'on their wits', although I'm not so sure you can draw a distinction between workloads when they're heavy and pressing, even if they encompass congenial enough subject matter in their basic remit. Work is work is a heavy toad at times. Larkin also acknowledged its ability to blot out a quintessential loneliness or existential angst - 'give me your arm old toad; / help me down cemetery road'. What an old misery he was. Still, remarkably similar in those closing lines (to 'Toads revisited') to Stevie Smith's best remedy for the human condition in 'Deeply Morbid':
'smile, smile, and get some work to do
then you will be practically gone without positively having to go'.
Alas - not much juggling or sense of momentum here, apart from the emotion -blotting-out properties of relentless tasks to do. Whatever happened to 'Laborare est orare' - to pray is to work? CsÃkszentmihályi's psychological concept of 'flow' perhaps - full asborption in a task with all the pleasure and sustained momentum of genuine creativity. That feeling that the work is not only achievable, but also almost doing itself. That you have dipped into its liberating state of flow.
How easy to say and elusive to achieve, but I still prefer the model of work, or life as 'flow', to the squatting toad of numbness or the frenetic juggling of disparate, fragile balls - although I can see that really excellent, professional juggling might have its own sense of miraculous continuity, if you learn to care and not to care in the right measure...
'Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. They are named - work, family, health, friends and integrity and you're keeping all of these in the air. Eventually you understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends and integrity - are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. Understand this and you will have the beginning of balance in your life.'
This stuck in my mind, I suppose because I am dealing with what feels like a pretty punishing workload myself. I puzzled over its wisdom. Is it really the case that the work 'ball' will bounce back if dropped, in the current economic climate? Is this really the experience of people who have to take time out from their profession or current job for purposes of family or health? And isn't it the case that a supportive and responsive 'family', however large or small, or indeed a set of friends, would understand if you needed to concentrate your limited resources to push a work project throughto completion? When it comes to health, I'm more convinced that it's important to keep this ball in the air, as safe from harm as possible. Illness and exhaustion are horrible and can indeed lead to disease or accident serious enough to scuff or shatter. Ironically enough this is a ball that a lot of people think it's ok, virtuous even, to let slip on a more than occasional basis. And integrity- what kind of a concept is this? Can you be certain that integrity is such an inflexible, inelastic concept? Maybe so, particularly if there's a temptation to do anything illegal. Still - the idea that you can't make reparation for inevitable slips, hesitancies, acts of cowardice or panic - rather uncomfortable. We grow from mistakes and integrity is surely something we should feel we can regain and/ or work towards. That old idea of forgiveness and redemption.
Anyway, I did a bit of research on this idea of juggling balls and life aspects, and curiously, came up with several different versions of the 'parable' - in one it wasn't work which was the rubber ball at all, but all the others, barring family, if you are female (it was some kind of rather conservative church website). On another - not a church website at all - the 'integrity' ball was substitued by a 'spirit' ball. By this I assumed was meant spirituality in a wider sense. I preferred this, although again spirituality is something that many people turn to intermittently or (re)discover at some stages of life.
I suppose the whole metaphor is a pretty modern one. Dynamic, constantly needing attention to keep the whole cycle going. Life as a portioned-out, perpetually sustained performance. The balance, the equilibrium that can be achieved by best-conceptualisation of the balls, isn't a restful one but instead could at any time be lost through a slip of hand or eye. You can get a kind of exhilaration from it but there's not much time for forward planning or a sense of achievement. And yes, I know I'm expecting too much of a simple image, but even so -- one gets a sense of the underlying, perpetual urgency of life.
Work - Philip Larkin called it a toad:
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Working as a university librarian, he saw other professions - lecturers among them - as living much more lightly, 'on their wits', although I'm not so sure you can draw a distinction between workloads when they're heavy and pressing, even if they encompass congenial enough subject matter in their basic remit. Work is work is a heavy toad at times. Larkin also acknowledged its ability to blot out a quintessential loneliness or existential angst - 'give me your arm old toad; / help me down cemetery road'. What an old misery he was. Still, remarkably similar in those closing lines (to 'Toads revisited') to Stevie Smith's best remedy for the human condition in 'Deeply Morbid':
'smile, smile, and get some work to do
then you will be practically gone without positively having to go'.
Alas - not much juggling or sense of momentum here, apart from the emotion -blotting-out properties of relentless tasks to do. Whatever happened to 'Laborare est orare' - to pray is to work? CsÃkszentmihályi's psychological concept of 'flow' perhaps - full asborption in a task with all the pleasure and sustained momentum of genuine creativity. That feeling that the work is not only achievable, but also almost doing itself. That you have dipped into its liberating state of flow.
How easy to say and elusive to achieve, but I still prefer the model of work, or life as 'flow', to the squatting toad of numbness or the frenetic juggling of disparate, fragile balls - although I can see that really excellent, professional juggling might have its own sense of miraculous continuity, if you learn to care and not to care in the right measure...
Comments
Post a Comment