We work everyday.

If you’re not at your office or working on some project, you’re packing your kid’s lunch or listening to your friend’s story of work stress.

There is leisure in the midst of it, but we are never completely free of work. Physical work, emotional work, intellectual work: it’s all work.

So it’s not a choice between working and not working. Rather, it’s a choice between working with purpose and intention or working with frustration.

Yes, there are forces and factors that compound fatigue and frustration in people’s work, both paid and non-paid. Those of us who get to make lots of choices about how and where and when we work are the lucky ones. Yet the choice will always be there in whatever work we are required to do: do it well or do it just to do it.

Some days that choice is easier than others.

Happy Labor Day.

I’m not afraid that my contribution will be controversial or disruptive, that people will not know what to do with it or disagree with it. I’m afraid they won’t want to do anything with it. I’m afraid it will be boring. I’m afraid people have already heard it, and better, from speakers with flashier slides and more compelling anecdotes. I’m not afraid they’ll throw fruit and boo. I’m afraid they’ll yawn.

We know this is garbage, right? We know that the best truths bear retelling and that people are not yearning for visuals and witticisms. We know that. Still, we’re afraid our contribution is nothing special.

The best way to overcome the fear? Say yes. Commit to a deadline. Set a timer.

Time’s up. Time to give what you’ve got.

Please.

You worked for hours on it. You saved your changes. You backed up to the cloud. You got it done.

Then the cloud failed or the changes didn’t save. It’s gone. You lost it. You have nothing.

Or don’t you? The thinking and rehearsing and writing still happened. You can recall it, can’t you?

I’m just saying you haven’t completely lost it.

When she moved to Denver, my sister in law and I had some things to talk about for the first time in the roughly 10 years I’d been seeing her sister. I’m from Denver.

It helped that she took an interest in the Rockies.

Visiting my parents now also included walks around 16th Street with her, stops at Diedrich Coffee, and evenings tasting Denver’s newest microbrews in her Capital Hill apartment. I was full of envy; she lived the life I yearned for as a suburban adolescent: urban, single, cool.

Her marriage changed those visits a little. She and her wife got a house with a garden, so instead of walking downtown we sat around the firepit in the backyard. We still drank microbrews though. We started bringing a baby on those visits.

That season ended before I could really appreciate it when she abruptly moved to France by herself. She visited us in Los Angeles while she was securing her visa, and we only saw her one more time after that, when we visited for three days in 2015. Another city apartment. A different wife. It didn’t feel like it fit.

My sister in law and I had leaving Denver in common now, but that felt more like a divide than a bond.

 

 

 

The best submission we received to our new college literary journal came from my future sister in law. It was an essay about a time when she accidentally ran over a deer with a combine while living on a farm in South Dakota. It was painful to read, yet not gory. It made you ache for the author, who cradled in those pages more pain than a reader would think bearable. Reading it made you hope you never experienced anything like that, but also made you wish that maybe you would, if only so you could write about it the way that she did.

What I didn’t know then about the toll of cradling such pain.

The woman who would become my sister in law was a legend in my mind before I ever met her. She graduated from the literature department of my small Kansas college the year before I arrived, and from my very first course professors were invoking her name as star Christian college student, the embodiment of rare literary acumen combined with authentic religious devotion. My flirtation with her little sister seemed to actually bolster my academic credentials.

I didn’t meet her until the very end of that first year. She came back to campus with her parents for a worship service commissioning her brother for summer service in a traveling evangelistic rock band. I sat next to her in the front row and recall being too intimidated to speak. What could I say that wouldn’t sound ignorant or fake? The only interaction we had in that meeting was near the end of the service, when worshipers were urged to leave their seats and surround the band members, laying their hands on them in prayer. This kind of public expression of piety was new to me, but I was eager to participate (and to be seen participating, especially by the missionary family of the girl I was in love with). But my future sister in law didn’t move. As her parents and little sister strode to the front, she stayed in her seat.

I gave her a look like, “We should go, right?” She looked back at me only long enough to say, “You can go up there. I’m not,” and then she turned away and looked into the empty space in front of her.

I wobbled to the front. The legend was real, but also different.

Of all the humanity that swirls around you as you sip your free-with-the-price-of-admission pint on the fifth story observation deck of the Guinness storehouse in Dublin–the beautiful revelers crammed into the glass-walled bar above you; the devoted students studying the hops wall exhibit below you; the tired parents with kids clinging to center facing bar chairs on your right and your left–the interaction that catches most of your attention is the tall, broad shouldered man leaning over what must be his teenager daughter, urgently rubbing her shoulders with a strained look that combines grief and uncertainty while she stares blankly out over the ledge. Presently his wife joins him, and then their younger son. Those three confer with one another, not saying much, clearly pained and clearly torn about what to do. The daughter never moves.

What blow has been dealt her? Has someone died? Or is it less than that, some teenage drama to which parents are sympathetic but that will be forgotten in time, the slight of a friend or the rejection of a college? There is no evidence anywhere, and I want so badly to find out. The public suffering of strangers is excruciating to witness without feeling a need to help.

Her family leave her alone for several minutes, and when they return its clear they need her to move. They are weighed down with backpacks and gift bags, and it is late in the afternoon. But she won’t, and so they can’t. They stand there motionless for another minute, exchanging pained looks every few seconds. This seems to be how they will exist forever now.

Our pints are done and our kids are restless, so we collect our jackets and begin the descent to the gift shop. I turn and look one last time to see if anything in the tableaux has moved, hoping selfishly for some resolution, or at least some movement, some hope, some progress, but I know there is none of that to be had, at least not in this moment.

The first thing I saw when I got to my desk for the first time since my vacation was a Leuctthurm 1917 notebook, 249 blank pages, hardcover, dotted, colored anthracite.

I was sure I took it on vacation and lost it. I was certain why I took it, where I lost it, and how. I was upset with myself about it.

And yet here it is, staring me in the face on my desk, prompting a different memory than the one I’ve been living with for two weeks, the one in which I failed to take responsibility for something. In this memory I take the notebook out of my backpack before leaving my office, deciding that it’s unlikely I will actually use it on vacation and not to risk losing it.

Memory is weird. I mean, what other things am I walking around mad at myself about that I didn’t actually do?

A Leuctthurm 1917 notebook, 249 blank pages, hardcover, dotted, colored anthracite.

A waistband travel wallet with elastic strap and all its contents: drivers license, debit card, and 100 Euro in cash.

These are the things I lost on my vacation.

The notebook is gone for good. I took it thinking I might set up my next Bullet Journal during some slow afternoon, but there were no slow afternoons and it got left behind when we moved house the first time, when I failed to perform a final sweep of the room. I know just where I left it.

I also know just where I left the travel wallet: on the window ledge of the downstairs bathroom of the third place we stayed. We were three hours away (for good) before I realized that I’d left it, when I reached for it to pay admission at a castle.

That sinking feeling when you’re standing in a medieval castle and you realize you’ve left your wallet behind and there’s no retrieving it . . .

I only just replaced my drivers license too.

So I phoned the owner of the house from the second floor of the castle’s great hall, fully aware of the human juxtaposition inherent in using a cell phone in a castle. I left a message: I’ve left my wallet, can you please mail it to this address, where I will be in four days. Here’s my phone. Here’s my email. Cheers.

Two hours later I called again, and this time he picked up. The wallet was already sent. My message was a bit garbled, so he looked up the address himself. He’s only just posted it. He won’t hear my offer of compensation.

You lose things on vacation. Some of them you get back.

An American woman I saw in the gift shop of Trinity College in Dublin was not so lucky. While others sized up sweatshirts and Book of Kells souvenirs, I watched her enlist security staff to look for something. I don’t know what it was, but at one point she turned to me, a complete stranger, and announced in a sort of half-plea-half-apology, “I’ve lost something.”

The next day I saw her at the airport, just behind us in line at US customs, and I know she never found it. She said to her two kids in shaky breaths, “I don’t even know what I lost.” When we passed one another in the zig-zagging line, I looked away.

 

I got in to see a doctor in about 30 minutes, then was examined, diagnosed, and prescribed in about 10. A very brief stroll to the chemist’s procured my antibiotics, and a call to the b&b owner got me a ride back to my room, where I could begin taking my medicine and try to make up for some of last night’s lost sleep.

That was my Thursday morning in Headstrom, Ireland, a tiny town in County Galway on the shores of Lough Corrib where my family and some friends were spending a few days exploring Connemara and Galway. Well, they were exploring Galway. I was being seen for a screamer of a sore throat that followed me from Scotland to Giant’s Causeway and then out west. Last night was intolerable; swallowing was torture. Serious antibiotics were called for.

It’s a joke how kind and helpful the Irish are, especially to strangers. The owner of this b&b told me just where to go and to call her once I was done so she could collect me. The doctor called ahead to the chemist to let them know that “an American gentleman” was on the way to pick up 21 tablets of Augmentin. He even pronounced my last name correctly; nobody does that on the first try. The chemist came out from the back to deliver my prescription personally and wish me better health.

Those few hours arrested a slide into misery and set me up to enjoy my last few days of holiday. Also, it doesn’t hurt that Ireland has a healthcare system that allows a person to be promptly seen by a primary care physician without an appointment and for modest cost. The visit and medication cost me 70 Euro.

Helpful, welcoming people and access to affordable, effective healthcare: more than Guinness or Aran Wool, these are the important things I got on my Irish vacation.