Fit via vi.
The following essay was written many years ago while I was teaching high school in South Carolina. The pay for teaching was low and required me to work Saturdays as a brick mason. The mixture of emotions included the weariness that attends living below a living wage as well as the gratefulness that comes from the realization that I had choice and autonomy with my supplemental income. This essay is my effort to make meaning of my situation and connect the present experience with my life’s work.
As for the writing itself, there’s much that I’d want to change about it, but I’ve decided to publish it here unedited. The writer reflects a younger, less-experienced me to whom I am learning to extend grace for his effort and heart if not for his ability to express meaningful thought.
Photo by Arham Jain on Unsplash
Work is difficult. Sometimes it is difficult simply because—well, it’s work. It requires effort, stamina, sweat, and exertion—all of those things which cannot be enjoyed from the comfort of a couch or a hot tub or whatever other venue we choose for relaxation. Work removes us from our place of comfort and forces us to operate in a place of discomfort. Because of this, work is often loathed and has prompted such crooning as “Take this job and shove it.”
But, of course, work is not at all a bad thing, generating a high level of satisfaction, especially if it includes a product that gives me a sense of immediate accomplishment. Being a school teacher, labors like mowing the lawn allow me to feel intense pleasure once accomplished: the smell of fresh-cut grass, the look of a manicured lawn, and the exhilaration of energy spent to name several benefits.
Recently, I came across a couple of lines from Kahlil Gibran centered on work that challenged my attitude quite severely. He writes in The Prophet that “when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream assigned to you when that dream was born, and in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life” (25). At first glance, the ideas of “earth’s furthest dream” and “loving life” offered their challenges, but after a little while they made sense as they revealed themselves in my life: the desire to love God through the labors of teaching and writing and to love life through a wonderful family would offer a very high quality of living and a lot of joy. What caused great consternation, however, was the fact that to get to my goal, i.e., “earth’s furthest dream,” requires a lot of real sweat, real labor, and real determination. For me, that means laying brick.
Eyebrows became bloated sponges that dribbled sweat into my eyes and shirts could be changed with the hour. It was miserable.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
I grew up with this trade. Sometimes I joke that I started “six months out of the womb” because my father has been a brick mason for many more years than I have been alive. When really young, there were the trips with Dad to work where I would play in the sand pile hour upon hour and bricklaying was simply a time of play. Then, as is my nature, I wanted to do it, too, and that desire landed me a spot in front of the wall raking or pointing the joints. From there, handing brick; then, setting the brick on the supply planks, and by the ripe old age of 14 mixing the cement full-time whenever school was not in session. Now, it must be mentioned that all—with the exception of the first five years of my life—took place in Sarasota, Florida, which resembled more of a furnace in the summertime than a romantically described sun-splashed city on the west coast of Florida. Temperatures during the months of April through October regularly hit 90-plus with similar numbers gauging the humidity. Eyebrows became bloated sponges that dribbled sweat into my eyes and shirts could be changed with the hour. It was miserable. When I was 16, my family moved to the upstate South Carolina/North Carolina area where the summers were not quite as severe in that the 95-degree heat only lasted for the months of July and August. It was nonetheless a continuation of my teenage years being forged in the kiln of bricklaying. I was sure I had left it behind when leaving for college. I was wrong; a major-change between sophomore and junior years got me a B.A. in Religious Studies with a minor in Greek which equals no real job. Thus, bricklaying continued to be a part of my life.
Now, the tone with which I’ve said all of this is depressing—granted. It’s really not that bad; in fact, when I contemplate Gibran’s statement about “fulfull[ing] a part of earth’s furthest dream” there is a lot of hope. Those years of toiling have yielded a skill to me that is culturally and geographically transferable. When we spent seven months in England, work was readily available; when we returned to the US and settled in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, work, again, was not difficult to come by. London was a place where I was pursuing my desire to teach at a university and to lay brick for the sole purpose of empowering that dream was not a strained effort. I felt courage to meet those whom I did not know, to take on bricklaying jobs I had not done before, to labor in a culture that was foreign to me simply because it was giving feet to my dreams. South Carolina, too, became a place where bricklaying supports my addiction to studying and teaching, where I find the strength to endure 100-plus heat indexes during the summer and Saturdays spent with a trowel and mortar board. In fact, what was once a torturous labor has become a source of strength by letting me see instant progress through a cleverly-designed corner, a set of columns, the skirting for a home, or a tiled floor or shower all because I am pursuing “a part of earth’s furthest dream.” When I stop and reflect upon my opportunities I realize that I am “loving life” as well. That’s quite the opposite for someone who detested the business.
The essence of this grace that has been given to me is captured with three words by Vergil in The Aeneid. I stumbled across them in a class with Dr. Darryl Phillips during the summer of 2007 when we were reading Aeneas’s recount of the fall of Troy. Preeminent in his retelling of the horrors to Dido is the death of Priam at the hands of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. The inner sanctum of Priam where his wife and children huddle against the onslaught of Greeks is penetrated by Neoptolemus and several of his comrades. Wielding a double-edged axe, he batters the heavy door from its hinges, eyeing the immortality that is his if he kills the king of Troy. When the door posts yield, Vergil augments the magnitude of his determination with the statement fit via vi, which when translated means “The way was made by force.” This phrase describes succinctly the effort and resolution of one who spies his furthest dream on the other side of a heavy door and labors to that end, knowing that anything short of completion is utter failure. Ever since encountering this, I have found myself saying it over and over—such as at 4 a.m. when rising to study—or penning it into a book which reminds me of “earth’s furthest dream” or proves to be a difficult read. But, of course, when I rise on a Saturday knowing it is bricklaying lying before me, the phrase creeps to my lips, and I move on, realizing not that I must muddle through another day on the construction site but that what lies before is a door post I must batter if I am to pass.
With all this said, I hope to hang up my trowel and put away my mortar boards someday, at least not depend upon them to pay the bills. Work that allows me to love life will hopefully come in the form of writing and academics, but by then I will hopefully understand the necessity work plays in my ability to enjoy it. Which reminds me: Kahlil Gibran must have been speaking from his own experience when he penned these thoughts on labor. Mere poetry does not inspire the unexpected joy and fulfillment one witnesses after having toiled toward the “furthest dream.” Which is where I find myself. The life that I have been given overflows with fullness: my family of a wife and two children with whom I enjoy each day, teaching with its triumphs and failures that pushes me to find an intellectual and pragmatic balance, studying with its rigorous challenges that leave my mind exhausted but well-nourished, and bricklaying with its bleeding fingers and sweat-filled days. This is my life where I struggle to “fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to [me] when that dream was born, and in keeping [my]self with labour [I am ] in truth loving life." Fit via vi.
