Essays
To Be of Use (2004) Anne Nelson
The movie of the year in 1981 was called Chariots of Fire. At first glance, it seemed an unlikely prospect for Hollywood — the story of two British runners who won medals at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. But like many works of drama, Chariots of Fire was about far more than the superficial plot suggested. It was about what makes people run.
Last year I checked the film out of the library to watch it again, this time with my children, aged thirteen and fourteen. I wanted to figure out what it was about it that haunted me those years. The film opens at Cambridge University as the students arrive for the fall term. One of them is Harold Abrahams, a handsome, intelligent, wealthy champion runner. But he is also Jewish, living in a period and in a society that has many notes of anti-Semitism. He knows that in order to make it to the Olympics (and, in his own mind, thereby to prove the worth of himself and his people), he will have to make the leap from being an excellent runner to being a great one. He seeks out and hires the best coach he can find, and expends every last ounce of energy and time in training, perfecting his form, honing his times. He is a determined man who is set on his goal. It is — however satisfying it may be — work.
The second runner, Eric Liddell, is the son of a Scottish Presbyterian missionary. He knows that he is destined for missionary work in China. But in the meantime, he also knows he can run. He is a natural. Eric has a coach whom he respects, and he trains systematically. But you get the feeling that he would achieve greatness no matter who coached him. There are two things you notice about him every time he runs: first, he has a unique — well, let's be frank, it's downright odd — flailing form which, nevertheless, is also very fast. His second trait is the expression of rapture that shines from his face as he runs. Perhaps he enjoys winning — he knows that it is important to the people around him — but you suspect that his real joy in running is purer than that. It is - however laborious — his art. Or is it play? Or is it prayer?
When Eric explains himself, he suggests that it's all three: "I believe that God made me for a purpose: he made me for China. But he also made me fast. When I run I feel his pleasure."
Here we have two men, ostensibly doing the same thing and both doing it surpassingly well — but for contrasting reasons. Yet as different as the two men are, the film portrays both of their characters and their motivations with respect. Furthermore, every time I see this movie, it tells me a little more about the rest of us.
There is a lot in common between running and a professional life, after all. Both involve making judgments about yourself — discerning which incentives make you perform, and which ones help you excel. Both disciplines involve long, invisible hours of toil, while the outside world sees only the narrow wisps of glory — which may or may not correspond to the person who has worked the hardest. I think that in choosing and pursuing a professional path, the ideal course is to combine the qualities of the two runners. Harold deliberately chooses an achievable goal and puts energy, determination, and labor into reaching it. This is his choice. Eric finds what he was uniquely born to do and does it with all his heart. Running has chosen him. But it is also noteworthy to me that both men see the act of running as a service to their respective communities, and on another level, as a service to their God. And eventually both move on to other, less glamorous forms of service, when the time is right.
My experience in wrestling with vocation has had three chapters so far: my own working life, my seven years of advising graduate students, and my watchful interest of the development of my two children, David and Julia. Perhaps the easiest chapter for me has been my students, since that's where I found it easiest to be objective. When I ran the international program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I sat down with applications from prospective students from all over the globe, and as I reviewed them, I favored those who were motivated by the desire to do good in the world. But they also had to have talent and drive to succeed in the demanding program. As they completed their course of study, they usually came to me to talk about jobs, agonizing all the way.
As impressed as I was by some of their abilities, I was often amazed at how passive they were about their futures. At the exact moment when they should have been reaching down to explore the depths of their self-knowledge, they were running through a hall of mirrors, in a desperate search for their own reflection. Some pored through the want ads with the simple intention of taking the first, or highest, offer. Others fixed their working identities to the image their fathers, or their professors, or their boyfriends projected for them. They certainly would never have allowed someone else to choose a wife, or a home, or even a car, for them on that basis. Yet they were going to spend at least as many waking hours at work as at home. Shouldn't the choice of work be equally serious?
My first move was usually to recommend a book: Kate Wendleton's Through the Brick Wall.1 Although it's directed at career-changers, it offers a series of quizzes and exercises that force readers to assess themselves and their real priorities in life, and these are equally applicable to first-time job hunters. There are few wrong answers. The book offers a common-sense, mechanical approach to the job market, and focuses the reader on four sets of issues:
What are you good at (that you also enjoy)?
What kind of daily life do you want to lead?
What kind of people do you want to be around in your workday?
How do you imagine the stages of your life?
I know these questions may seem overwhelming to a young person, but if you reflect on them one by one, answers start to emerge. I would ask my students to start by looking at their metabolism. Are you a sprinter or a marathon runner? What kind of day do you want, bustling or calm? What kind of people bring out the best in you — thinkers? Doers? Nurturers? I could see that some of my students were powered by adrenaline, and thrived on the stimulation and deadline pressure of newspapers and wire services. Others were more reflective or people-oriented, and happily went into fields like research or teaching.
The last issue on the list — the stages of life — is particularly difficult for a young person to grasp. When I was twenty-five, I found it hard to imagine how someone could live without the energies and passions of a twenty-five year old. But interests and priorities change in ways you can't always predict, and in today's marketplace, jobs change too. The average American changes jobs every three-and-a-half years. One of the smartest things you can build into your professional portfolio is the capacity to adapt, so you can change jobs as circumstances require.
Sometimes my students (especially the women) would look at me and sigh, "How do you do it? You've got everything — a job, a writing career, a family...." I could not find it in my heart to tell them how often I felt like a failure, how often "having it all" meant cutting corners, apologizing for shortfalls, and making mistakes.
Instead, I gave them the easy answer: sequencing. Early on in my teenage years, I knew that there were three things I wanted and needed to do in life: have a creative life, earn a living, and have a family. I have managed to pursue all three. But usually I have had to settle for two out of the three at any one time.
I made an early, somewhat calculated decision to have my adventures early — before a family figured into things. When I was growing up, it was not assumed that a woman would work outside the home. Yet I longed to see the world, and I yearned for an independent identity. I felt a fierce passion for social justice, a will to defend the underdog, and a desire to watch history as it was being made. I suppose those were some of my core values, as well as part of what made me unique. All of this led me to travel and write, through my twenties and early thirties.
There was more than enough injustice in the world to go around, of course. I found that my equivalent of Eric Liddell's running — the "job" that I was somehow born to do — was the task of trying to understand the human motivation behind political circumstances, and of explaining people to each other. So in my mid-twenties I found myself in mud-and-straw peasant huts on volcano tops in El Salvador, feeling distress at the suffering of these people, but also a quiet thrill that they trusted me with their story. I felt, deep down, that I knew how to carry it, carefully, back home.
This was a calling — but was it a profession? Many aspects of it were rife with defeat. I knew I couldn't stop the war. I couldn't even set a bone or clean a wound. But I could do my part to see that the victims of this particular chapter were not erased from history. When the fieldwork began to take an increasing physical and psychological toll on me, I shifted gears. I went from gathering stories and information in the field to finding ways to put these to good use, first as an editor at Human Rights Watch, then as director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In a still later phase, I taught human rights reporting to young journalists who were setting out in the first phase of the professional life cycle — with the strong hope that I could help them avoid some of my past mistakes.
None of this was a conscious career plan; rather, it was adapting my work to my circumstances. The best thing about the first phase — reporting — was being able to put every ounce of myself into it. The best thing about the second phase — editing — was organizing and utilizing all I'd learned in the first. The best thing about the third phase — teaching — was combining the professional methodology with everything I'd learned from raising children. Now I am part of the way into a fourth phase, and it's a little nerve-wracking not to know exactly what it will look like. I know that it has to do with writing about big themes, and about understanding and explaining complex social structures to new audiences. Once again, it's about taking the dominant questions in my life and putting them together in yet a different way, integrating whatever I've learned in the meantime. Sometimes I feel too tired to reinvent myself again, but apparently it is required. There's a comfort in remembering that past forks in the road were uncertain too, and somehow they worked out.
In the course of wrestling with a profession, it helps to recall that there are no absolutes. The more you see of the world, the more you realize that the values of work are highly relative. In Japan, the "salary man" has long labored under the assumption that he and his corporation are bonded for life. In China, a child's choice of profession often carries the burden of hopes and expectations, not just from his family, but from the entire village. In India, the caste system long determined not only what work one was likely to do, it also defined what work one was allowed to do. It is only in an advanced, individualistic, industrial democracy (the United States is one of very few) that we have such a dizzying array of choices and decisions regarding our life's work. And sometimes (in the same way we can be overwhelmed by the endless array of shampoos or breakfast cereals on the shelf), we wish someone would just choose for us. Yet, if we relinquish the power to choose, we squander one of the great gifts that has been handed down in our tradition, enshrined in our laws and encoded in our language: the right to self-determination.
Some of the challenge lies in defining the distance between self-fulfillment and self-indulgence. Our society is not at ease with negotiating the demands of individualism, responsibility, and social obligation. We can all point a finger at someone we know who has behaved selfishly at the expense of his family or community, or conversely, became a martyr to the demands of family or community without ever benefitting from the chance to take a risk or dream a dream. It all comes back to the question of balance — the three-legged stool of self-expression, dependability, and service. A good life requires all three. Over the course of a lifetime you can occasionally make do with a little wobble to one of the legs. You can shift the emphasis from time to time. But you do need all three. Do what you love, meet your obligations, and do more good than harm. In the 1924 Olympics, Harold Abrahams, who ran to prove something, and Eric Liddell, who ran to praise God, each fulfilled all three requirements, in different measures.
As I look at my children, in their early teens, I can see many different interests and abilities that have variously appeared, evolved, faded, or waxed over the years. When we talk "What do I want to do when I grow up?" they go through lists of professions like Kleenex. I tell them that's fine. Sooner or later, they'll catch fire about something, and it will be like falling in love. And like falling in love, it may last and it may not. They may catch fire about something else later — and they may not. There are many different paths to a happy life, and I know many people who have led a productive, contented life without ever knowing a consuming passion for an idea, a pastime, or a person.
But when I think of what I really hope for my children, a poem by Marge Piercy comes to mind: "To Be of Use." The final stanza goes:
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
Has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
But you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real. 2
I don't want my children to forget that their great-grandparents were Nebraska farmers who worked in overalls with mud on their hands, who made something beautiful and useful from a prairie landscape. At least some of them truly loved their fields, and their work. When my children choose their own vocations, I yearn for them to know both sides of the coin, the toil and the delight. And I want them to remember that a field can be as beautiful as a poem, and that a poem can be as useful as mud.
--------------------------
1 Kate Wendelton, Through the Brick Wall: How to Job-Hunt in a Tight Market (New York: Villard Books, 1992).
2 Marge Piercy, To Be of Use (New York: Doubleday, 1973).
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To Be of Use (2004) Anne Nelson
The movie of the year in 1981 was called Chariots of Fire. At first glance, it seemed an unlikely prospect for Hollywood — the story of two British runners who won medals at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. But like many works of drama, Chariots of Fire was about far more than the superficial plot suggested. It was about what makes people run.
Last year I checked the film out of the library to watch it again, this time with my children, aged thirteen and fourteen. I wanted to figure out what it was about it that haunted me those years. The film opens at Cambridge University as the students arrive for the fall term. One of them is Harold Abrahams, a handsome, intelligent, wealthy champion runner. But he is also Jewish, living in a period and in a society that has many notes of anti-Semitism. He knows that in order to make it to the Olympics (and, in his own mind, thereby to prove the worth of himself and his people), he will have to make the leap from being an excellent runner to being a great one. He seeks out and hires the best coach he can find, and expends every last ounce of energy and time in training, perfecting his form, honing his times. He is a determined man who is set on his goal. It is — however satisfying it may be — work.
The second runner, Eric Liddell, is the son of a Scottish Presbyterian missionary. He knows that he is destined for missionary work in China. But in the meantime, he also knows he can run. He is a natural. Eric has a coach whom he respects, and he trains systematically. But you get the feeling that he would achieve greatness no matter who coached him. There are two things you notice about him every time he runs: first, he has a unique — well, let's be frank, it's downright odd — flailing form which, nevertheless, is also very fast. His second trait is the expression of rapture that shines from his face as he runs. Perhaps he enjoys winning — he knows that it is important to the people around him — but you suspect that his real joy in running is purer than that. It is - however laborious — his art. Or is it play? Or is it prayer?
When Eric explains himself, he suggests that it's all three: "I believe that God made me for a purpose: he made me for China. But he also made me fast. When I run I feel his pleasure."
Here we have two men, ostensibly doing the same thing and both doing it surpassingly well — but for contrasting reasons. Yet as different as the two men are, the film portrays both of their characters and their motivations with respect. Furthermore, every time I see this movie, it tells me a little more about the rest of us.
There is a lot in common between running and a professional life, after all. Both involve making judgments about yourself — discerning which incentives make you perform, and which ones help you excel. Both disciplines involve long, invisible hours of toil, while the outside world sees only the narrow wisps of glory — which may or may not correspond to the person who has worked the hardest. I think that in choosing and pursuing a professional path, the ideal course is to combine the qualities of the two runners. Harold deliberately chooses an achievable goal and puts energy, determination, and labor into reaching it. This is his choice. Eric finds what he was uniquely born to do and does it with all his heart. Running has chosen him. But it is also noteworthy to me that both men see the act of running as a service to their respective communities, and on another level, as a service to their God. And eventually both move on to other, less glamorous forms of service, when the time is right.
My experience in wrestling with vocation has had three chapters so far: my own working life, my seven years of advising graduate students, and my watchful interest of the development of my two children, David and Julia. Perhaps the easiest chapter for me has been my students, since that's where I found it easiest to be objective. When I ran the international program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I sat down with applications from prospective students from all over the globe, and as I reviewed them, I favored those who were motivated by the desire to do good in the world. But they also had to have talent and drive to succeed in the demanding program. As they completed their course of study, they usually came to me to talk about jobs, agonizing all the way.
As impressed as I was by some of their abilities, I was often amazed at how passive they were about their futures. At the exact moment when they should have been reaching down to explore the depths of their self-knowledge, they were running through a hall of mirrors, in a desperate search for their own reflection. Some pored through the want ads with the simple intention of taking the first, or highest, offer. Others fixed their working identities to the image their fathers, or their professors, or their boyfriends projected for them. They certainly would never have allowed someone else to choose a wife, or a home, or even a car, for them on that basis. Yet they were going to spend at least as many waking hours at work as at home. Shouldn't the choice of work be equally serious?
My first move was usually to recommend a book: Kate Wendleton's Through the Brick Wall.1 Although it's directed at career-changers, it offers a series of quizzes and exercises that force readers to assess themselves and their real priorities in life, and these are equally applicable to first-time job hunters. There are few wrong answers. The book offers a common-sense, mechanical approach to the job market, and focuses the reader on four sets of issues:
What are you good at (that you also enjoy)?
What kind of daily life do you want to lead?
What kind of people do you want to be around in your workday?
How do you imagine the stages of your life?
I know these questions may seem overwhelming to a young person, but if you reflect on them one by one, answers start to emerge. I would ask my students to start by looking at their metabolism. Are you a sprinter or a marathon runner? What kind of day do you want, bustling or calm? What kind of people bring out the best in you — thinkers? Doers? Nurturers? I could see that some of my students were powered by adrenaline, and thrived on the stimulation and deadline pressure of newspapers and wire services. Others were more reflective or people-oriented, and happily went into fields like research or teaching.
The last issue on the list — the stages of life — is particularly difficult for a young person to grasp. When I was twenty-five, I found it hard to imagine how someone could live without the energies and passions of a twenty-five year old. But interests and priorities change in ways you can't always predict, and in today's marketplace, jobs change too. The average American changes jobs every three-and-a-half years. One of the smartest things you can build into your professional portfolio is the capacity to adapt, so you can change jobs as circumstances require.
Sometimes my students (especially the women) would look at me and sigh, "How do you do it? You've got everything — a job, a writing career, a family...." I could not find it in my heart to tell them how often I felt like a failure, how often "having it all" meant cutting corners, apologizing for shortfalls, and making mistakes.
Instead, I gave them the easy answer: sequencing. Early on in my teenage years, I knew that there were three things I wanted and needed to do in life: have a creative life, earn a living, and have a family. I have managed to pursue all three. But usually I have had to settle for two out of the three at any one time.
I made an early, somewhat calculated decision to have my adventures early — before a family figured into things. When I was growing up, it was not assumed that a woman would work outside the home. Yet I longed to see the world, and I yearned for an independent identity. I felt a fierce passion for social justice, a will to defend the underdog, and a desire to watch history as it was being made. I suppose those were some of my core values, as well as part of what made me unique. All of this led me to travel and write, through my twenties and early thirties.
There was more than enough injustice in the world to go around, of course. I found that my equivalent of Eric Liddell's running — the "job" that I was somehow born to do — was the task of trying to understand the human motivation behind political circumstances, and of explaining people to each other. So in my mid-twenties I found myself in mud-and-straw peasant huts on volcano tops in El Salvador, feeling distress at the suffering of these people, but also a quiet thrill that they trusted me with their story. I felt, deep down, that I knew how to carry it, carefully, back home.
This was a calling — but was it a profession? Many aspects of it were rife with defeat. I knew I couldn't stop the war. I couldn't even set a bone or clean a wound. But I could do my part to see that the victims of this particular chapter were not erased from history. When the fieldwork began to take an increasing physical and psychological toll on me, I shifted gears. I went from gathering stories and information in the field to finding ways to put these to good use, first as an editor at Human Rights Watch, then as director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In a still later phase, I taught human rights reporting to young journalists who were setting out in the first phase of the professional life cycle — with the strong hope that I could help them avoid some of my past mistakes.
None of this was a conscious career plan; rather, it was adapting my work to my circumstances. The best thing about the first phase — reporting — was being able to put every ounce of myself into it. The best thing about the second phase — editing — was organizing and utilizing all I'd learned in the first. The best thing about the third phase — teaching — was combining the professional methodology with everything I'd learned from raising children. Now I am part of the way into a fourth phase, and it's a little nerve-wracking not to know exactly what it will look like. I know that it has to do with writing about big themes, and about understanding and explaining complex social structures to new audiences. Once again, it's about taking the dominant questions in my life and putting them together in yet a different way, integrating whatever I've learned in the meantime. Sometimes I feel too tired to reinvent myself again, but apparently it is required. There's a comfort in remembering that past forks in the road were uncertain too, and somehow they worked out.
In the course of wrestling with a profession, it helps to recall that there are no absolutes. The more you see of the world, the more you realize that the values of work are highly relative. In Japan, the "salary man" has long labored under the assumption that he and his corporation are bonded for life. In China, a child's choice of profession often carries the burden of hopes and expectations, not just from his family, but from the entire village. In India, the caste system long determined not only what work one was likely to do, it also defined what work one was allowed to do. It is only in an advanced, individualistic, industrial democracy (the United States is one of very few) that we have such a dizzying array of choices and decisions regarding our life's work. And sometimes (in the same way we can be overwhelmed by the endless array of shampoos or breakfast cereals on the shelf), we wish someone would just choose for us. Yet, if we relinquish the power to choose, we squander one of the great gifts that has been handed down in our tradition, enshrined in our laws and encoded in our language: the right to self-determination.
Some of the challenge lies in defining the distance between self-fulfillment and self-indulgence. Our society is not at ease with negotiating the demands of individualism, responsibility, and social obligation. We can all point a finger at someone we know who has behaved selfishly at the expense of his family or community, or conversely, became a martyr to the demands of family or community without ever benefitting from the chance to take a risk or dream a dream. It all comes back to the question of balance — the three-legged stool of self-expression, dependability, and service. A good life requires all three. Over the course of a lifetime you can occasionally make do with a little wobble to one of the legs. You can shift the emphasis from time to time. But you do need all three. Do what you love, meet your obligations, and do more good than harm. In the 1924 Olympics, Harold Abrahams, who ran to prove something, and Eric Liddell, who ran to praise God, each fulfilled all three requirements, in different measures.
As I look at my children, in their early teens, I can see many different interests and abilities that have variously appeared, evolved, faded, or waxed over the years. When we talk "What do I want to do when I grow up?" they go through lists of professions like Kleenex. I tell them that's fine. Sooner or later, they'll catch fire about something, and it will be like falling in love. And like falling in love, it may last and it may not. They may catch fire about something else later — and they may not. There are many different paths to a happy life, and I know many people who have led a productive, contented life without ever knowing a consuming passion for an idea, a pastime, or a person.
But when I think of what I really hope for my children, a poem by Marge Piercy comes to mind: "To Be of Use." The final stanza goes:
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
Has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
But you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real. 2
I don't want my children to forget that their great-grandparents were Nebraska farmers who worked in overalls with mud on their hands, who made something beautiful and useful from a prairie landscape. At least some of them truly loved their fields, and their work. When my children choose their own vocations, I yearn for them to know both sides of the coin, the toil and the delight. And I want them to remember that a field can be as beautiful as a poem, and that a poem can be as useful as mud.
--------------------------
1 Kate Wendelton, Through the Brick Wall: How to Job-Hunt in a Tight Market (New York: Villard Books, 1992).
2 Marge Piercy, To Be of Use (New York: Doubleday, 1973).
