Stacking Up

Labor Day is not just the unofficial start of fall, the last of our lazy summer season before schoolwork and job work kick into high gear. Labor Day is set aside to honor the contributions of the ongoing labor movement to standards, wages, and safety in our workplaces. It’s a day that honors all laborers and the achievements we’ve made with our work.

I’ve been thinking about these things throughout the weekend as I helped to pack up a family member so that she can relocate while repairs are made to her house. I’m beat up, bruised, scratched, tired, and dirty. In other words, it’s a typical weekend where I’ll crawl back to work and say, “Oh, thank goodness I’m back here again. Nothing to do but work now.”

This weekend, I managed to tangle my feet and trip twice, barely catching myself each time. They were both slow-motion near-falls where I had time to flail and panic and say, “Whooooaaaa,” before my brain kicked in and told my feet what to do. (I’m told they were comedic moments. That’s me; here for family entertainment.)

Anyway, before the Labor Movement in America, 80-or-more-hour workweeks were a standard because there was no established timeframe for how much a person could work in a week. Labor Day, by contrast, reminds us that we can stop working. (Not that anyone said anything about our weekend hours and how many we can stack up stacking boxes and totes that we carried from one basement to another. Yes, our weekends are still ours to cram in as much or as little as we please, my friends.)

And Labor Day is also a time to honor our work achievements. Maybe you have some certificates on the wall and maybe they do or don’t mean something to you. Maybe you’re a wiz at the soft skills—being a good friend to a coworker or being able to lighten the morale. Maybe you’re the one person in the whole building who will put more paper in the copier (if this is you, bless you!). But maybe your real work begins when you punch out each day, the work of running your household and making sure your family is loved and fed. And maybe you have a little time to yourself some of those days, time where you zone in on what you deeply value and you get the writing done and the art made and the music practiced. It may not be pretty.

In fact, the whole process might be a mess. But there are nuggets of gold in that mess, and you know it. And that, my friends, is something you can work with.

Kudos to you this Labor Day. Our world would not be the same without your valuable work.