Stop Splitting Yourself from Work

We humans are good at splitting. We split wood. We split atoms. We split mountains to make way for roads and for coal. We split genders. We split ourselves into good and evil. We split ourselves from the natural world that sustains us. We stand at a distance from ourselves and from others, and we call it normal; we call it sane.

           

If we are to stop the destruction of the environment, we will have to stop the splitting of ourselves from our work.

           

How did we become a society of people who have split what we want from how we work?

 

How can we continue working in disempowered, disconnected, and destructive ways when what we want is health, balance, and peace?

 

This split, this way of working, comes from a worldview in which humans and the natural world are viewed as objects. And in order to survive in this world, we have turned ourselves into objects and turned toward the acquisition of objects in an attempt to find comfort.

 

In the next few weeks, I will share some writing exercises that will help you stop splitting yourself from your work. Here’s the first one:



Write about the work you value.

Think about the work you do that you might not think of as work. Perhaps you care for a child or an elderly parent. Perhaps you keep a garden. Perhaps you speak kindly to a person at your grocery store. Allow yourself to view all of this as honorable work, as preparation for Earth Joy Writing the world as we want it to be. Write for five minutes about this work. Just because you are not paid for something with money does not mean that what you do each and every day is not work. Begin to honor it as work. Value it. Value yourself.