no coffee needed.

No coffee has been needed today, but perhaps it would have been preferred. When you work a standard M-F job, 8-5, it's easy to lose sleep... especially if you are prone, as I am, to stay up until midnight, 1, or 2am as the occasion may be because of a self-imposed deadline... so really I can only blame myself for my lack of sleep. I've had a stressful few days.

At my job today I was thinking again about how unsuited I am for what I am doing. Not only is my job in an environment that is stifling rather than stimulating or relaxing, but the actual job requires a very good memory for details, and for keeping track of these details months down the line, and also for having enough foresight and grasp of the business to be able to ask the important questions... well, maybe this doesn't make sense. But I need more structure. Here I am, trying to analyze my job and I am trying to do so by fitting the job into a concise explanation, and well, I'm never concise, and the job can never be explained. This is obvious because after nearly a year (just 3 weeks shy in fact) of working here, I still am utterly confused at times as to how this company functions. At previous jobs, I could handle the details, the workload, the stress, the time-crunch. During my time as a stage manager for theatrical productions, I even thrived under pressure and with managing a huge list of details. But I knew why I was doing what I was doing, and I could strategize about the best way to reach the goal. I cannot do that here. Either that, or my mind has just shut down in the past 2 years.

What, then, would help jobs to be more satisfying, fulfilling, or even just... diverting?

I still maintain that, at least personally, I feel greater satisfaction from my work when I am using my hands... and typing on a keyboard just doesn't count. Using my hands to create, construct, mold, shape, or beatify in some way. For example, carpentry or gardening. I imagine I would much rather enjoy myself employed in those activities than the ones I am doing now. After reading a section from the book of Acts, there was a discussion on whether or not cities - modern day or at the time of Christ/the apostles - had an actual effect on the spiritual life of its inhabitants? Specifically, do cities lead man to have more idols than someone who lives in the country? A couple points were raised, first, that ultimately the cause of idolatry is the heart, and whether or not man lives in a city or the country does not change his fallen state that might lead him to idolatry. The counterpoint was that cities provide the circumstances for idolatry in that they isolate man from the land and provide objects or possessions or more wealth that distracts a man from spiritual matters. There's the recap of the discussion.

I learned recently that the word for "Christian" in the Russian language used to be identical to the word for "farmer." The explanation given to me by the native Russian speaker was that all the farmers and peasants who lived in the country were Christians. The largest contingent of Christians were farmers. Later, I am not sure when, they decided to create a separate word for Christian from the word for farmer. Hence, the word for farmer is christianka and the word for Christian is hristianka. (These are my terrible transliterations into the Roman alphabet... and they both have feminine endings because I can only remember the endings that I would use in describing myself.) So... what can we learn from this linguistic trivia? Does this speak of a deeper truth about the relationship between work and religion, landscape/environment and spirituality?

In Genesis, man is called to work - to actually rule and subdue - the land. Yet we also know that work becomes toil. It becomes a burden. Why? Is it because work is difficult? It requires physical exertion? The exertion of one's mind? It brings pain - blisters and heat and scrapes and long hours and fatigue and sunburns... etc? Yet I still feel that the blisters and heat and long hours in a garden is more enjoyable than the simple office with the comfy swivel chairs and the technologically advanced computers and machinery and the air conditioning and artificial lighting that cater to one's ease and comfort... I would actually prefer the physical pain to the mental stultification, the toil to the "ease" of technology.