When I was in college, we always found a certain irony in the fact that we did not have Labor Day off. Ours was a work college where we held 15 hour a week jobs on campus. We did not see actual cash (we were paid with a stipend toward room and board) and we sometimes quoted the old Soviet saw, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Nevertheless, many of us did render useful work. For me, there was something very formative about working on a building maintenance crew and seeing the difference between a clean and a dirty floor. One summer I stood guard over a freshly waxed common area because of my pride in the job we had done. I came to understand what Dr. King meant when he said “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
Back in May, this article in the Times Magazine articulated better than I ever can why manual labor is valuable and important. We tend to assume that those who don’t sit behind a desk are only working with their hands because they have no other choice. There are days when I suspect I am sitting behind a desk because I am not cut out for anything better. Today, as we pause from our labors, I take much more satisfaction in the clean house and tidy yard that are the results of the work of my hands than in the websites and spreadsheets which occupy most of my days. I’ve never felt the need to keep someone off of my freshly programmed formulas. Now why is that?