Worth and Work

I was driving home contemplating something that wasn’t as successful as I had hoped it would be. Worth is separate from work, I tried to remind myself. Meaning that my worth, and how I feel about myself on this particular day when I am tired and discouraged about something I was working on, was separate from the thing I was working on. Or should be.

It is so subtle when we mix the two up. Like folding flour into batter, it starts slowly and looks like the two would never merge into one, and then the flour is gone, immersed in the more liquid batter. So it can be with our worth when we mix it with what we do: we lose our sense of self in our product, in our outcome. And when that outcome is going just as we’d hoped, this fusion of identity and work doesn’t feel so bad; we can almost start to believe it is ok. But when the work falters, or we get responses we didn’t plan for, or we fail, that fusion of our worth and our work crashes over us, leaving us feeling hollowed out. 

I pulled into the neighborhood and I thought about a friend’s funeral I had been to many years before. A tragic sudden loss, no one could have prepared for, something that just shouldn’t have happened. At that funeral I remember being struck that no one, not any of the grief- stricken people who loved this person got up to that microphone and spoke about the work this person did - which was by earthly standards quite impressive. Not one. There was no mention of any of it. Instead how this person made everyone feel, the impact this person left in each life relationally was praised, mourned, laughed about - over and over and over. There was no confusion at the end, no immersion of worth into work. Just worth, just who this person was to everybody there.

I pulled into the driveway to three sweaty kids with paper cups, a sticky card table, and kid-sized chairs strewn about. Everything and everyone was tired and sticky. Colorful straws placed thoughtfully into a little mug, a carefully hand-drawn Lemonade Stand sign, now discarded on the dirty ground with drips running down and through the marker drawings of lemons and ice cubes. “We only sold one cup. One cup! All day,” they told me. 

“That’s ok,” I told them as I pulled each of their sweaty heads close for a hug. “That’s ok,” I told myself internally laying aside my perceived failure I had mulled over all the way home. Their failure that day looked messy and small and had nothing to do with the worth their mom sees in them; of course it didn’t. What a ridiculous notion that it even would. And so the same with me, I quietly reminded myself, as I put my arm around the oldest one, the youngest one scurrying next to us, and we walked into the house, leaving our messes and failures, far from our worth, strewn out behind us.