Your Work Matters. And it Doesn’t. Be Glad.

I sit in an empty computer lab, surrounded by the sleek machinery of digital existence, propped in the curvature of an adjustable office chair. I have been here all day, all week, working hard, even harder than usual, spurred on by participation in a writing cooperative. There are others in neighboring rooms, secreting words onto screens, words about wildlife conservation, words about neurotoxins, words about Milton and Lonergan and Owen, words about the nature of attention and the ways we imagine the Apocalypse. In my quiet corner, hunched between my tea mug and the Velky Česko-Anglický Slovník, I am concentrating fiercely on the demanding labor of translating seventeenth century Czech. “Oh God, God, God! God, if you are God, have mercy on me in my misery!”

(That last part was not actually me; that was the last sentence I translated. I am, in fact, not very miserable at all at this particular moment. Huddled in a nest of dictionaries, following arcane verbal rabbit trails, I am having enormous fun of a kind that I would likely be hard pressed to explain to most passing motorists. Perhaps even to most of my colleagues.)

I stand up, stretch, grab a tangerine, and walk over to the windows. The building is next to a highway, and a parade of vehicles streams relentlessly past. As the taut elastic of my attention pings free from its tether, I stand juggling conflicting stories about the traffic and me.

If only they knew, goes one. Here are all these people, hurrying to the store, the dental appointment, the job site, the school, driving past a building with windows behind which important work is happening, profound work, ideas that could change things. Even my own current immersion in the writings of Comenius, the seventeenth century Moravian bishop, theologian, philosopher, and educator, is rooted in a sense that it matters, or will matter if I can persuade a few people that there are still things in his writing that we need to consider. If only they could see what I see, perhaps they might want to pull over for a while.

Why should they care, goes another. They are engaged in the stuff of the real world, earning a living, assisting colleagues, collecting children, getting people to where they need to go. The things they are scurrying toward have immediate consequences for their incomes, their health, and their families. And here I sit wondering whether it would be better to render strašlivý as terrible, frightful, ghastly, or awful.

(Awful, I think, at least for the time being. Awful like the sneaking thought that this is selfish indulgence and a waste of exhausting labor. Awful like the periodic suspicion not just that it might matter to no one, but that perhaps it shouldn’t rightly matter to anyone. Hmm, perhaps I could find my way toward a little misery.)

My project, a story for another day, is large and demanding. Depending on when you ask, you might find me thinking that it could be my finest contribution yet or that I have finally and utterly overestimated the degree to which my peculiar intellectual passions have any significance at all and should quit while there is still time to pivot to something actually useful.

A truck barely held together by rust passes. Then a van from a pet grooming service, a bus with a company logo, a swarm of cars, a mechanical excavator balancing a large sofa on its bucket. I work patiently at linguistic minutiae, and the world keeps passing by at something approximating the speed limit.

I wonder how my feuding stories fit together. Am I supposed to be finding a way to sustain an unwavering conviction that academic work matters? Should I be accepting that it’s just my job and plenty of other folk, along with me, are doing things today that will leave no furrow? Should I be looking for a golden mean, an equanimity that steers between overconfidence and despair?

In one of Comenius’s works, Panorthosia (Universal Reform), he suggests an alternative to the balance image, something that comes closer in spirit to saying “all of the above.” In a chapter devoted to our responsibility to reform ourselves, he urges that “you must be fully transformed so that you are Everything, Something, and Nothing. Everything in yourself, Something in human society of which you are a part, and Nothing in the presence of God.”¹

In yourself, he explains, you have a full share in the status of being “a true image of God and Christ,”² and that is to be expressed in every part of your life; therefore, you have a stake in every facet of human existence. The goal of “representing the very likeness of God in the actions of your daily life”³ calls for holiness, mercy, generosity, and kindness to be expressed in all human tasks: managing your health, making a living, seeking understanding, controlling your desires, and doing your work. Having a specialization does not exempt you from any part of this, because your life is lived before God as a whole human being. Living that life in the image of Christ requires transformation of its every facet.

Yet each of us also has a position in society, and so it is good to be “something,” to “fulfil your own vocation without presuming to go beyond it.”⁴ As the body has many parts, so you do not need to envy the work of others or inflate the value of your piece. You should do the work appropriate to your own calling “without looking round for another one.”⁵ It’s enough to be a twig on the tree, a stone in the temple, and weighing which twig or stone matters most is missing the point.

But acknowledging your limited contribution to the larger scheme of things is not enough without also “acknowledging your nothingness, laying yourself empty before God in such deep humility that you take no credit for any good thing that you see before you.”⁶ Rather than worrying about status, you should “ascribe everything to God, remaining ready to endure even dire confusion and strife as the penalty for your ignorant use of God’s gifts, and begging forgiveness of your sins.”⁷ None of your righteous acts are pure or sovereign. God opposes the proud and exalts the humble.

As with so many of Comenius’s thoughts, the inseparability of the three parts of the argument is key (for theological reasons he was very fond of “three-and-yet-one” thought structures, sensing in them echoes of God’s nature in creation). Focus only on the splendors of multifaceted human existence, and we get triumphalism and delusions of grandeur. Tell only the nothingness story, and we risk degradation. Focus only on your part in the play, and wider purposes fade. The three are all true at once, not in turn. While Comenius did sometimes invoke the golden mean, his instinct was often to shift from dichotomies to triads and turn everything up to eleven. You are and should strive to be, at one and the same time, everything, something, and nothing.

I find this a richer frame for the minutiae of scholarly work than the “everything matters a little bit” impulse that sometimes seems to be implied by balance metaphors. The specific work that I do is part of a glorious whole, an ingredient in an endlessly complex and shifting kaleidoscope of human possibility lived in God’s presence. It is a tiny contribution among many, many others, including those of all those folk on the highway, to the weal of the world, neither insignificant nor the answer, just one piece of the puzzle. And it does not matter at all, because the world belongs to God and I am small, foolish, and mostly mistaken, yet lifted up anyway because of mercy rather than achievement. Acknowledging all three and dwelling on their simultaneity is freeing.

1. John Amos Comenius, Panorthosia 20.12. All quoted text here is from the translation in John Amos Comenius, Panorthosia or Universal Reform, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993.
2. Panorthosia 20.13.
3. Panorthosia 20.15.
4. Panorthosia 20.17.
5. Panorthosia 20.17.
6. Panorthosia 20.18.
7. Panorthosia 20.18.