Today at work, I was thinking about the stress my family has been under , and half-thought to myself, "As human beings, we are not made to watch another person die." Instantly, I realized that this was incorrect.
As human beings, we are supposed to be with others - those we know, love, share community with - in illness and death, birth and joy.
It's the cube farm we're not made to do this in. Isolated from those we share the most with and under flourescent lights, breathing canned air, muffled by white noise.
Tears and blood and messy moments aren't the unnatural. Being compartmentalized and pressed away from these things is.
7 comments:
This is true. The office must be the most unnatural state humans have created, but at least we're busy making someone else rich doing it.
I actually love my job; my people, the work I do, the industry I'm in. It's fascinating and my loyalty is firm.
But the way we've designed jobs as a general concept, this corporate setup and the cube farm and all that - yeah.
Sigh. I am so tired.
I've never worked in an office, but I do see people die in my line of work and it doesn't get easier with time.
30 years a secretary, I can't even imagine what it must be like for you. I'll say that though it's not unnatural for us to live with death, to be nearer to it than we seem to be in much of the modern world, I have no illusions it's any easier. But we do bear it differently in community, I think. Community, communion, communication, congregation. These things mean something ...
I kinda-sorta touched on this a little for my flash story this past Monday. If you'll excuse the link, here it is. I love people, and yet my default is to be on my own. This means it takes a lot of effort for me to socialize, but I never regret it when I do. *sigh*!
Link away my friend! I may not be keeping up with the A to Z'ers among us, but I like a signpost to a good post...
Very nice.
I am perhaps even more a hermit than you. Apart from Penelope and Gossamer, there is nobody to intrude on my solitude at home most of the time. It can be tiresome, but it's also obviously been my choice to a major extent.
Even with that, though - the office construct feels like as artificial a wall as any cube's flimsy little barrier. It's been difficult, of late, the whole work/life balance thing. I feel balanced on one of those flimsy little barriers myself, too much of the time.
I love to socialize, but I'm also a hermit. Balancing between the two is not always easy...<3
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