The Possible

From a slow and very hazy place, I realize that the life I’ve had is the life I’ve asked for. I don’t mean this in some cosmic sort of “before I was born” way, but in an ordinary, slogging my way through life way.

One of my most fervent prayers has been for my work and my life to be one. I hated the feeling of working for the man, the work that had me setting my life aside to go spend half my day in the employ of someone who had the right to tell me what to do.

I didn’t always feel this way but began to with the first great work experience I had…one that didn’t feel that way…one full of friendship and collaboration and spirit. “This is the way to live,” I told myself. “I want to live without that separation of work and life. I want it all to be of one piece.” I didn’t think of it as being what I needed to be happy. I merely saw that it was possible. And if it was possible once, then it had to be possible again, right?

Fast forward to twelve years after leaving the great job where work and life were one and I got paid for it – paid to get up and go there, to be exactly where I wanted to be – not in terms of place (University of Minnesota) or the work, which wasn’t exactly of my heart and soul but was at least from someone’s (my boss, Vernon Weckwerth, was passionate about his work and the program he created).

Character sketch here: Vernon is a self-proclaimed maverick, a pain-in-the-neck or worse to his faculty colleagues, ahead of his time, brilliant (a bio-med statistician), always out for the people in the field doing the thing and a melding of the theoretical with the experiential. A great role model/mentor who’d say, “If you’ve got lemons make lemonade” and ask you to “make it happen” without telling you what to do, and who didn’t care if you “made it happen” in twenty minutes or two weeks as long as you got it done competently.

His person fit his role and he had no concerns for prestige or advancement at the cost of staying within the system, and so he morphed into looking the part he played in his own way – no 50 year old turned hippie stuff for Vern, just a wearing of the same old polyester pants for 20 years, and the same tired wife-beater-t-shirts, under the same dingy white shirts and jacket that belonged with the pants, or in summer, over his Hawaiian shirts.

He had a bump in the middle of his forehead that we called his extra brains, thinning hair he combed around in a circle, a lurching kind of walk that after my grandson started walking I saw as the full-bodied, throwing yourself forward walk of the toddler, and he wrote screaming notes on post-its in capital letters and could sputter and bellow with the best of us.

Vernon’s program was where I wanted to be because there was that certain freedom that allowed something else to go on between me and my colleagues, Mary and Julie. We’d begun our spiritual journey and it had given each day and our every encounter the feel of possibility and of something essential happening. We could do a mailing and just by the act of being together our time still had that feel. I felt as if I was growing into my life. As if suddenly, at age forty, I’d begun to find myself, and my life was taking on some meaning, some significance, and some joy.

So when I left that job, I began to pray to live in such a way that work and life was of one piece, and at a certain point I thought it was the writing life, and at another thought I could create it with my own coffee shop, and finally, after years of non-wage earning grueling work and failure, thought it was what I found by caring for my grandson after his birth and my dad as he died (for no wage) and moved into eldercare (for a small wage) when a wage became absolutely necessary (after a foray back into short-term “desperate for the money” corporate, soul-killing work).

Then one day I began to wonder.

I began to wonder if this prayer had created this life where my work and my life are one in such a way that I have no life that isn’t work, and no work that is supportive of any life apart from it. I began to wonder if work and life are meant to be separated, at least a little, so that you know the difference between them, and so that the part of your life called “work” actually does provide for the rest of it that is “not work.”

That’s how I began to explore the possibility that I get what I ask for.