As I was sitting on a bench today in centre Athens waiting for the 8:30 meeting eager as usually to finish work thus ending up to early I could not notice the pattern of people going to work. It’s the flow of shirts, suits and ties which each morning go to their jobs. It’s the coffee can in all their hands which got my attention. Everywhere I went I have seen the same ritualistic behavior. All around are banks and other office business and all those people are probably going to a 9 – 17 job. As they are accepting, or even enjoying this condition what remains is the small details of each morning, the cup of coffee, the rolled cigar, the lunch break, the trip home and maybe other small elements specific to each office. Each day, for most of their life most of these people will be doing the same ritual. And yet on their faces I see no sorrow and no pain. It’s an implicit acceptance of the same fact repeated over and over as the society drives us to the same standard.
And yet, I am still running early for my meetings driven by an uncontrollable impulse to finish things faster, to finish work. The irreparable truth is that things cannot go faster and work will never finish while I, not embracing the given way of life, not relying upon these small rituals I end up thorn apart and running, and pushing a stone which will never reach the top of the hill.
And while I wrote this it’s already clear that the 8:30 meeting will become a 9:00 meeting as the rush does not seem to define life here.
One day later, as I am waiting in the airport for flight home after quite a successful install I cannot still grasp the meaning of all these people which fulfill the same rituals year after year.
Are they working for the retirement years? For their children and wife or husband? How many of them will reach that glowing age or thrown away by their children in an asylum will depend on a system for which they are no longer proficient?
Are they building something? Or in 10 years they will just be thrown for someone younger, cheaper with more working power? In a net of relations and connections will they survive to the ever ruthless adversary? Or, consumed and with the wicked mind they will dream of living the live they have thrown away by paying for the younger company?
Comments:
Len -
Someone asked me this question last year in January and I could not answer. Since then I found and lost numerous answers, all of them fuzzy and incomplete. Now it’s for a bed and a place to put that bed, and for a dream.
iri -
What about the rushing gentleman that wants it to be finished and done it? What does he work for?
The ritualistic people are perhaps blind to their condition. Or else, maybe they are accepting work as an indispensible price for their cherished moments. For the evenings of cuddling, for the eyes of their kids, for the stroll in the park. Maybe some of them add to the ritual because the nonsense of work is soothened by the idea that they are doing it “their way”, with their coffee mugs and their cigaret breaks and the 1 or two cubes of sugar.
But you, my dearest, seem to have rather recently found an awakeness that I salute, so ask yourself: what are you working for?