Ode to Productivity
For much of my early adult life I've believed that I could industriously work to till the garden, plant, water, weed, and harvest the fruits of my labor. This Puritan work ethic, this founding American myth of meritocracy, still colors how I look at my time, even as I see the falseness of this myth in my own life and in the larger world.
But here I am now, underemployed because of the pandemic, but able, because of stimulus relief, to get along well enough and I feel myself burdened by the shaking finger of Puritanism—being “on the dole” for the first time in my life and having more time available to me than I am used to, and feeling guilty that I’m not making better use of it.
Productivity—such a Taylorist, factory model view of human life! And yet, at the end of each day, I feel that stern puritan judge looming behind me, demanding, “Were you productive today? Did you make good use of your time on this planet today?”
I want to write a new manifesto on productivity.
Ode to Productivity
While I slept, my body restored itself in ways I cannot comprehend. Muscles relaxed and soothed themselves after the toils I put them through in the day. My dreams did important soul work in ways I will never be able to document.
While I read a book, my digestion and respiration and other autonomic functions carried on in their labors, without my management, with surprisingly efficient results. And in my reading, my mind wandered beyond the confines of my life and imagined the lives of others, and I felt emotions and had ideas that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
When I walked through my neighborhood streets, my manager walked with self-satisfied smugness, measuring steps counted, chalked up to maintenance of health. But also, I meandered through stories of imagining, especially after dark, when the glow of lights from homes provide voyeuristic peeks into other lives. The other evening, I stopped in shadow at the sound of piano music and watched as a man rifled through sheet music, then resumed his playing at the window. His home, a small Craftsman, was so elegantly appointed, with warm wood details and Tiffany lamps, and the music pouring into the night air so soothing. I confess, that I imagined myself into his life—oh, to live with someone who spent his evenings at the piano in such a beautiful Craftsman home! I built up a fairy tale about our romantic life together. That was a productive walk!
When I spend an entire day in the hot springs, first easing my sped-up mind into Harbin time by floating in the warm pool, listening to my breathing and heartbeat underwater, feeling my body rise and sink with my breath, and then explore the limits of my sensations alternating in the hot and cold, I release myself from my quotidian day and forgive myself for all I have not accomplished and give myself permission to be simply a human body floating in warm water.
I claim these meanderings and nothings as PRODUCTIVITY, for when the sun sets on my life, what will I want to be able to measure, if not the ways that I nourished my soul when I had so little idea about how to fit the world's measures of productivity?