What You Do and Who You Are

One of the most aggrevating questions for Carl is the one that almost everyone asks when they first meet a man: "What do you do?"

I have always found it interesting to follow the difference between men and women on this question. I can go an entire evening in a party setting with a room full of people I've never met and not encounter this question or maybe encounter it only once or twice. Now I hear "what does your husband do?" a lot, but I usually have to talk about my work before the question arises.

It is an incredible question when you think about it. It assumes a hell of a lot. It assumes that all adult males should be able to answer the question succinctly. It assumes that knowing the answer to the question is tantemount to knowing the person. It assumes that any adult male who cannot answer the question is lacking something.

Carl does a lot. In fact, he probably does more in a day than most people in the 9 to 5 work a day world. In fact, he probably does too much. We have a sign on our wall that says "If you have been working for 15 hours and it feels like the end of the world, it is not. It is just the end of the day." That is because Carl often works until he can't any more.

But Carl works at many things that can't be formalized into a "position" or "job." I won't even try to give them labels here because to label them misses the point.

I put Carl in a growing class of people who understand the difference between having a job and doing what Sarah Nelson and D.J. Swanson (co-creators of CLAWS) calls "joyful work." These people also understand the value of leisure.

When Carl and I talk about work, we often have a hard time distinguishing between "work" and "play." This is because many of the things we do/have done are pleasurable and productive. We have come to call these things "activities" in an effort not to label them according to the dichotomy.

The following quote from Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society is quinessential Carl Wilkerson. I swear he said all of this in the past week in one way or another:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

So the next time you see Carl (or anyone for that matter), rethink the kneejerk quesiton of "what do you do?" and ask a more fun question like "seen a great sunset lately?" or "what's your favorite ice cream?"

Come on, break the dominant paradigm and have some fun!