Friends at work

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Let me start with two off-topic comments. First, lots of bloggers and columnists are filling their spaces this week with advice about how to survive the next four years. I will abstain from doing that because I don’t think any of us can really envision how it’s all going to unfold. I am a bit distressed, though, by how many people are choosing to tune out, take a vacation from the news. I think it’s important to remain vigilant, even though that steady dose of negativity will make us unhappy. In my literature classes I often posed the question, which is at the heart of a surprising number of novels: Would you prefer to be ignorant and happy or knowing and unhappy?

Second, a quick follow-up on last week’s 23andme posting. My initial contact with cousin Dan and his father Albert in California widened out this week with a Zoom visit Dan helped orchestrate which included several other cousins on his side of the family tree, some of whom have been doing their own research using Ancestry.com. I’ve decided to sign on for that service to see how much deeper I can go. I’m excited.

Now to the main event. I want to return to a topic that I addressed in the early days of my blog which has a new salience for me. The original blog was about the fact that our knowledge of even our closest friends derives from our social encounters with them – dinners, parties, trips. The missing piece is knowing them in the context of their work. That’s quite a gap for a population for whom work is at the center of their identity. In that original blog, I described a practice that a friend and I developed to fill that gap. One day each year we shadowed each other at work, a truly eye-opening experience.

It’s not practical for most of us to do that kind of shadowing, but there are other possibilities. For years our chavurah, the Jewish group that contains so many of our Chicago relationships, had a practice of inviting members to do a job talk following the potluck lunch after our monthly Shabbat service. We asked presenters to do the impossible – to convey to us a sense of what their work life looked and felt like in half an hour. We allowed some controlled time for QandA because, engrossing as most of these presentations were, people were eager to head home for their Shabbat naps.

I agreed to coordinate these talks because I’ve always been fascinated by the varieties of work people engaged in, a panorama so much broader than the narrow range of doctor, lawyer, teacher, computer guy and businessman that constitute the road maps of most young people. Studs Terkel’s Working was my bible and, more recently, Mark Larson’s update Working in the 21st Century.

Covid disrupted so many of our routines and practices, including the job talks, which disappeared from our agenda. But it’s making a comeback, inspired by our reading of a book by Rabbi Sharon Brous called The Amen Effect. It’s not the kind of book I’m usually drawn to, works of self-help and religious inspiration. It’s an honest book, full of personal stories of Brous’s efforts to deal with tragedy and loss in her family and her community. I’m compelled by writers who acknowledge their own vulnerability and who don’t pretend that they’ve got it all figured out.

Those of us in the chavurah who were reading the book were seeking to use it as a springboard for generating ideas about ways in which our community could draw closer to each other and to be more present when others needed us. It was in that context that the job talks resurfaced. The argument was that the more deeply we knew each other, the more we would be drawn together. That idea resonated with me, so I volunteered to resume my role as coordinator. I put out the call for volunteers.

Several people stepped up almost immediately, but I realized from past experience that I was going to actively recruit others. Some are too modest to shine the spotlight on themselves, while others can’t imagine that the work they do would interest anyone else. They are invariably wrong.

Looking at the initial list of volunteers reminded me of a profound change that had occurred in our group since we initiated the original job talks. Our community is aging, and a number of our members are now retired. This is an opportunity, rather than a problem. How are people using the time they now control? If their work has been central for giving their lives meaning, how are they seeking and finding new sources of meaning? There are still enough people who are still working at their “regular” jobs to sustain the original job talk format, but alongside that, I’m eager to hear about how people have pivoted in new directions that will define this next stage in their lives.  Volunteering? Exploring new spiritual practices? Traveling, hiking and biking? Engaging in artistic activities they had set aside for “later” now that later is here?

There are a lot of stories I’m eager to hear, and I look forward to telling my own, which is still slowly evolving, even though I’ve been retired by more than a decade. Our hope is that through the telling and the listening, we will draw closer and be more present for each other as we enter a time when our needs for support grow.

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Marv Hoffman

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