Last semester, while sitting in the lobby of the chapel, waiting to pass out Friday papers, the inner doors opened for a moment, and I heard the speaker speak the words made famous by Confucius: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” And my immediate reaction, before I could stop myself, was “no.” No, that’s not right at all. It can’t possibly be that simple, no, why would you say something like that? Is that supposed to assuage the rumpled soul of a soon-to-graduate-student like myself, reassure me that the past four years of my life have not been spent for naught? Is it a guarantee that I will somehow be successful and content in the future if I can just pick the right path, even when stories and statistics tell me otherwise? My questions amounted quickly, my indignation rising. However, recognizing the futility of getting worked up over words that I had heard only indirectly, and out of context, I tried not to let them get to me. Chapel ended soon thereafter, and my afternoon followed in an orderly fashion, according to routine.
Despite my best efforts to forget them, though, those words followed me for the rest of the day, and have been rolling around in the back of my mind since I first heard them months ago. My gut reaction to them is still the same as it was then, a determinedly firm “no,” but after mulling over, I think I can now better articulate why. As I have lived in different places and gotten to know many different people, a consistency has been that I am drawn to those who live life passionately. You know the type. The person who, for one reason or another, is filled with that near-inexplicable…thing. An unquenchable zeal, it would seem, for whatever it is that they love: a language, a theory, a field, an era, a medium, a people group. Of the people like this whom I have had the privilege to know, with their diverse dreams, desires, and domains, the commonality they all share is that they work. Hard. Their expertise or abilities are not the gifts of random chance. The love they have for what they do has been and continues to be the result of time and effort.
Which brings up a concept that came to me of my ruminations: in the lives of people I greatly admire, the love of their field or craft has been honed. They did not stumble, one day, upon an already-formed passion of unique and exquisite construction and go “Ah-ha, now I know what to do for the rest of my life,” get a job in that field, and then let nature take its course. The love each of these individuals brings to their work is attractive to me because it has been acquired and shaped gradually through, yep, work. For me, this creates a picture of the love for your job and the concept of work as being inextricably linked, one influencing the other in a continual, beautiful repetition. The work fuels the love, and vice versa. It is a never-ending cycle, or at least it is in its ideal form.
As I continued conceptualizing my rebuttal to Confucius’ long-esteemed words, I came across another problem: the use of the word “job”. Clearly, cultural and linguistic context are integral in understanding a statement such as this one, so I will refrain from criticizing Confucius himself, since I admit that I don’t really know what he hoped to communicate when he uttered the original version. The way the word “job” is interpreted in my context, however, still causes me to trip up here. I am a senior, and the closer I have drawn to the end of my time here, the more I have found myself confronted with queries about my next steps, my plans for the future. My answers to these questions, or lack thereof, often sound hollow, even to my own ears. I haven’t been able to select just one potential career, narrow down my options to just one path upon which to embark, choose that one job that I love because, frankly, I love too many things. There’s some overlap, sure, but the diversity of the things I have invested myself in makes it overwhelmingly difficult to pick among them. The way I have heard Confucius interpreted tells me that my uncertainty dooms me to drudgery; until I finally discover what I love, choose that job, and my life eases accordingly, but I disagree. I think the order of events is wrong, and I don’t believe that a ‘job’ should be my all-consuming goal in life. There’s so much else to live for.
So where does that leave me, at the end of my mulling-over these old words? It leaves me with the conviction that my focus in life should be in honing my passions, in developing my varied loves through work (since the latter is simply inevitable), and in seeing where these things take me. I desire to see my life amount to so much more than a job, even one that I love. Maybe not having a plan etched in stone will turn out alright in the end. Maybe it won’t. For now, I’ll keep working.