My last Good Letters post lamented the surreal appetites and remedies of the bureaucratic hive, as well as that world’s great need for beauty. I may have left you wondering: if life in the L’Enfant Plaza Canyon is so dire, then why don’t I just ditch it?
Aside from my lot as the family breadwinner, I stay on because I’m a bureaucratic idealist–and a tax-paying cheapskate. Giving government human rights programs purpose and accountability is an important civil service, and until I’m burnt out, I’m willing to serve as an apprentice and antagonist to the machine.
Also, I’m beginning to understand that work and creativity are surprisingly complementary. It may be that lessons learned in the separate-but-contrapuntal lives can save the other from angsty torpor.
A writer’s creative life teaches her that every word has unique power; even the most banal phrase, when set in the rhythm and sense of a poem, can bear sudden and necessary weight. The creative discipline challenges her to wield words in search of, and in service to, the truth of human experience; anything less is a draft or a sham.
And for the writer of faith, daily creativity goes even deeper: it engages the brooding, restless, beauty-craving God-image, luring us into and then out of ourselves until we arrive at worship.
These are good lessons to take back to the cube, where shuffled words and papers wield real, if distant, influence. Telling the truth, providing full information, and conveying bland but crucial data are all opportunities to remind oneself, even at the lowest moment of boredom, that words are powerful.
Moreover, facing dull, mundane work tasks can bolster attentiveness in creative work. The daily nine-to-five grind is more than decent practice for the task of sitting down, staring at the page, and confronting the story you left, gladly and desperately, the day before. Likewise, anyone who can unravel an unwieldy essay draft surely has the wherewithal to deal with a database meltdown.
As my fingers click across the keyboard, I can hear wiser, more resonant voices over my shoulder: Paul exhorting Christians to do all things to the glory of God, Mother Teresa counseling her sisters to do small things with great love. Perhaps there’s nothing new here, save the navel-gazing of twenty-first century day laborers with ergonomic desks, expensive MFAs, and God-shaped holes that not even a full day of Facebooking can fill.
But in our cubes or at our writing tables, we’re confronted with the basic stuff of human life: the tiny and interminable moment, the veiled struggles of sanctification. Hopefully, as we toggle back and forth between the two desks, we will be able to sense and seek the continuity between the two.