Today is the feast of Saint Joseph the worker.
One of the beauties of our Catholic Tradition is the value it places on work and particularly on the rights of workers – there is a rich library of Church documents and encyclicals on this most important element of social justice. Our bishops are outspoken in their defense of worker rights – especially now as those in essential services are being put at risk due to shortages of personal protective equipment.
One of the changes that has impacted many of us during this pandemic is how we actually perform our work to support our families and provide them with the necessities of life.
In the past, for most of us this has meant heading out most days of the week to an office, a store, a factory or a business to do our “work”. We rarely would let our “work life” overlap to a significant degree with our “personal life”. We would keep them separate, and put up pretty strict boundaries between them.
Our shared experience of living through this pandemic has been either (1) secluding ourselves and working from home, or (2) being in jobs that require us to work and put ourselves at risk, and hence we have become more aware of what can travel with us as we return home. …. so arriving home now includes a shower and change of clothes.
In either case, the lines between “work life” and “home life” have been significantly blurred.
In the first case, the boss’s suit now looks like a hoodie. You get to read the titles of the books on your workmate’s shelf. Everyone now knows you have a kitchen light fixture with a burned-out bulb. And your three year old chooses to break into the meeting to ask if they can go poo poo. Oh, and yes, no one is wearing shoes.
In the latter case, those in the home have become more acutely aware of the world you work in. And you have become more acutely aware of how connected those worlds are. So, returning from work also means potentially bringing into the house an illness that has no place there. Arriving home used to be “hello honey – I’m home”. Now it is a shower and a change of wardrobe to “inside clothes”.
Regardless of how you are experiencing the impact of the pandemic on your work, one thing is for certain. The firm lines that divided work life from home life have been blurred. And maybe that is a good thing..
I have often struggled with seeing black and white in a world of grey. It seems we have compartmentalised our lives in a way that isn’t really very accurate or helpful. We look at the roles we play, and then disassociate them from each other… as if we were something other than just one person. The result of this has been an unfortunate denial of how integrated we are as a human being. I am not work Gary separated from home life Gary or from father and grandfather Gary or Deacon Gary or husband Gary: I am just Gary, all of the above. Yes, it is important to recognize how you and I may use different sets of skills in performing each of these roles – but we are not different people when we are in these roles.
Thinking that we are has led to some really unusual behaviors. Like at work when a decision is made that affects you and the boss says, “this isn’t personal, it’s just business,”. Wrong. It is always personal! We are not automatons programmed to one task. Statements like “it’s not personal” are a clear sign of a lack of leadership skills. And they create a toxicity that expands throughout an enterprise. And beyond. This sense of disassociating our behaviors from who we are has huge – massive – societal implications.
Perhaps, after experiencing the disruption this pandemic has caused in our lives and in our patterns of thinking, we will be able to recognize the price we have paid for these divisions of self. And break down some of those arbitrary walls that distorted who we are, how we see ourselves, and kept us from a more holistic sense of self.