A Life's Work

In my last post, I mentioned a grandmother who had successfully raised her children and now considered herself eligible for dentures, although her natural teeth were perfectly serviceable.  According to my dentist’s view of her, she considered her life’s work over.  I wrote about my father, who clung to his life’s work almost to the day he died.  And I said that my own life’s work would not be over as long as I was compos mentis. 

After posting that essay, I began to wonder what I meant by my rather glib use of the term "life’s work." If it’s one’s career, then mine ended twenty years ago, when I took early retirement.  But this is an era not only of frequent job changes but also changes in career.  Lawyers become teachers and teachers become lawyers.  Businessmen leave their executive offices to become cabinet makers.  Tycoons run for office or devote themselves to philanthrophy.  Mathematicians become biologists or philosophers.   Some people change careers when they're fired from a job and find that they need to switch fields in order to find employment.  Others change careers because they’ve become dissatisfied with their work and seek greater fulfillment from it. 

Still others are pushed into a new career by the force of circumstance.  Vaclav Havel was a distinguished playwright before he led the fight for Czech independence and subsequently oversaw the peaceful breakup of his country into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.  Was his life’s work in literature or politics?  Anthony Trollope was a high official in the British Post Office, who introduced the mail box to Britain and negotiated postal treaties with other countries.  He’s remembered of course for his novels and travel books but does that mean we should ignore his career in the post office? 

It seems to me that one’s career offers too narrow a focus in determining a person’s life’s work.  One’s career or careers should be included, of course, but there is more to a person’s life than his or her career.  In speaking of Trollope’s life’s work, for example, I’d include his devotion to fox hunting (most of his novels contain a fox-hunting scene, and he rode to hounds three times a week in season). 

Considering fox hunting as part of Trollope’s life’s work suggests that our life’s work represents our effort to live as fully as possible, maximizing experience, being alive to the wonders of nature and the beauties of art, and contributing to enriching personal relationships.  The money one has made, the papers and books one has written, the innovations one has made – one’s career accomplishments - all contribute to the extent of a life’s fullness but they don’t define it.  It’s worth again quoting the surgeon who said that everyone dies but not everyone lives.  The purpose of life is to live.  Our life’s work is to live it as fully as possible.


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