We have to work to earn our keep. It is also well-established that idle hands tend to find trouble, and so work also keeps us on the straight and narrow. But beyond these age-old adages lies an important question: is looking for work just about finding an occupation and getting paid? Is there perhaps some specific sort (or sorts) of work that we’re supposed to do? If so, what is at stake in finding the work that we’re supposed to do or called to? How do we even identify it?
The work one chooses to do matters. Imagine if Aristotle had decided not to pursue philosophical questions, instead focusing more on his work in medicine, biology, and literary criticism? Looking back at Thomas Jefferson’s massive role in America’s coming into its constitution as a new nation, is there not something jarring about the idea that he could have chosen to be a full-time architect instead of a statesman? This isn’t to suggest that medicine or architecture are lesser pursuits—rather the idea is that it borders on inconceivable for us to look back and imagine that Aristotle or Jefferson might have chosen to focus on other work in lieu of their massively influential work that ultimately cemented their places in history.
Aristotle and Jefferson worked in these other fields, but these other fields were not, for either of them, what most would call their life’s work. But there is a sense in which these works that occupied a lesser place in each of their lives may have very well prepared them for—and even been essential to—what is commonly considered to have been their life’s work. It isn’t hard to imagine that Aristotle’s work in medicine, biology, and literary criticism may well have granted him greater context and depth in his thinking about what is required for a human being to live well and flourish or his conception of the human soul—two of his most important philosophical undertakings. Nor is it difficult to imagine that Jefferson’s work as a lawyer and architect prepared him for and helped shape his later work as a statesman, as an architect of a new nation and its legal system.
What ultimately turns out to be one’s most important work—what we call one’s life’s work—is often prepared for and shaped by other work done along the way. Sometimes this preparation is part of our planning, but in many cases it is only later on in retrospect that we come to recognize the work that came before as having been necessary preparation for the work of today or the work that has defined one’s life.
Even if it is not the work that ultimately defines our lives in retrospect, the work of today is in another sense one’s most important work: it is the work we are to do today. It isn’t the work of yesterday nor the work of tomorrow, it is the work we are presently confronted with and with which we are to engage in earnest. Even if it is the work of tomorrow that will define our lives, the work of today still has to be done. A life’s work is not just a life’s defining work, but also the rest of the work that prepared for it.
When we learn to find the work we are called to do today and we train ourselves to hear and answer that call, we are in yet another sense preparing: we are training ourselves to hear a calling when it arrives.