Is there an inherent good in all work. What is it?

Think of all human occupations through the ages – the farmers, the soldiers, the sailors, the welders, the chefs, the priests, the lawyers, the bankers, the bank robbers, the insurance agents, the politicians, the mechanics, the journalists, the professors, the teachers, the police, the computer programmers, the actors, the doctors, the nurses, and so on.

Imagine being something else in one’s own time or in another place and another time.

How about a shepherd? That would be the one. To be a shepherd in fifth century B.C. or a shepherd in the hills of Britain many centuries ago – that would be the career.

A shepherd’s life is elemental. There is plenty of time to walk and think. The sky is overhead and open land stretches before him. He probably doesn’t own any of this land and he is poor, but his constant companions are submissive creatures, some of the most gentle in the animal kingdom. They recognize his voice in the dark. His dog is trustworthy and reads his thoughts.

His existence is simple, but full of occupational hazards. There must be moments when he lays his head on his stone pillow at night and, surveying the stars overhead, feels not wonder, but worry.

Our shepherd is a human being.

Perhaps, in looking at his days, we can find some guiding principle for all human occupations. There must be something that links them all together, some ideal they hold in common.

People say the highest purpose of work is to express our individual talents.

But if self-fulfillment is the highest purpose, many people –maybe most – are left in the cold. Has our shepherd ever had the option to find his born career? Did our shepherd ever stop and think what he would most like to be? His work was likely given to him and he never had the luxury of looking.

What truth and meaning does he find in it? He must find this: he is master and slave. He is ruler and ruled. He is no different from all of us. At the very minimum, he governs himself.

There is an unseen hierarchy and we must find our rightful place in it, a place with something below and something above.

The human body appears to liquefy with age. It actually grows more arid, but it seems to slowly melt into the earth. This metamorphosis, which seems to slowly drag every cell with it, is visually compelling.  Its physical effects are so unlike the beauty of youth that they are often mistaken for its opposite.

If one takes the separate features of the old – the skin, the hair, the eyes, the posture – one finds almost no support for the argument that age possesses its own beauty.  But, the whole often conveys something the parts do not.

What is this something?                                                   

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