“Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life. They should also govern it.”
Wilhelm Reich
In this day and age, when we perform large amounts of work at home because technology now allows it, with email and the Internet, our workspace or study is another room to consider in House Therapy. This room reflects a public persona despite being located within the home. In this space we can see our attitudes and relationship to our working selves. Have a look around now at your working space or in your study. What colours are most readily seen in this room? Does it indicate seriousness or perhaps exactness about its décor? There is usually little frivolousness in the set up of this room. There may be the odd silly trinket on a desk or such like, that you would find in any office, offsetting the overall seriousness of the place, but in general it is usually more prosaic.
The Work Room at Home
“The work we do is a reflection of who we are. If we’re sloppy at it, it’s because we’re sloppy inside. If we’re late at it, it’s because we’re late inside. If we’re bored by it, it’s because we’re bored inside, with ourselves, not with the work. The meanest work can be a piece of art when done by an artist. So, the job here is not outside of ourselves, but inside of ourselves. How we do our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside.”
Michael E. Gerber, The E Myth.
Work for many people is a pretty serious business, as it involves making money, either in exchange for skills and labour, or through business, and this money is often what pays for your survival and that of your family. So, work has its roots in some fairly deep trenches within our lives, but it is a mistake in my opinion to view work in a money centred way as it is much more than that. Our working life represents our quest for glory and reward in the world, it is here that we mount our charger and array ourselves with weapons and armour in readiness for doing battle with the dragon of material reality. Many of us spend the majority of our most awake hours at work and we are involved in much more than merely generating money. Work has creative dimensions no matter what we do for a living and demands of us we give it our best shot, or we face the ignominy of failure and possibly losing our job or means of income. We risk what we have and what we may earn every day through our work. We also risk our reputation and place in our society, so there is a lot going on through what we call work.
The Ever-Changing Face of Work
“When automaton rearrangements occur so gradually that no one starves, they are often beneficial. Everyone used to gather or hunt their own food, but agricultural technologies have gradually reduced the percentage of the population that farms to about 3 percent in the industrialized countries. And that’s freed up many people to spend their time at other pursuits. The relative mix of those occupations change over time, as in the shift from manufacturing jobs to service jobs in recent decades. A century ago, the two largest occupational groups in the developed countries were farm workers and household servants. Now they’re a small fraction of the total.”
William H Calvin – How Brains Think. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997, Page 158.
Our work room is also the opening or portal into our lives of immense and rapid change. Technology may be our armoury in doing battle with the dragon of material reality, but it is also a whirlwind of unstoppable change and it is roaring through our lives in the twenty first century. The speed at which the kind of jobs and industries are becoming obsolete, especially in the west, is breath taking. No sooner do you pick up the skills of web master than they become yesterday’s comparative advantage. Social media, through Facebook and the like, render to some extent websites irrelevant and the tidal wave of communication suddenly provides these applications free to all consumers. Examples such as these are everywhere in just about every industry – and in industrialized countries governments are struggling to keep up in their pursuit of economic advantages for their constituents.
How will you fare if you are not prepared and inadequately equipped? Work then becomes a matter of some desperation and a sense of things spiralling out of control. The part of our self that is the hero in our story has lost her or his way and the failure of this sub-personality can have devastating effects upon our self as a whole. Work in the modern age is quite possibly more highly valued than any other pursuit, as it involves our sense of security for our self and for others. Working from home for many is still a challenging and risky thing to do, as it requires us to be able to separate some pretty demanding areas of our life and yet all live under the one roof, hopefully in idyllic harmony. So once you have made that momentous decision about working from home, in part or full time, then it becomes incredibly important to have a workspace or study, which is well designed to serve your purposes and the purposes of those you share your living space or home with. Because when you bring home the dragon of material reality and set out to do battle with it at home, you better be well set up and prepared not to let it destroy the harmony of your house or home.