They are how we use our heads, hearts, and hands, (to borrow 3 of the 4 H’s) , to help bring more love into the world. For a big part of that, we’re getting money to buy food, pay our mortgages or rent, clothe sprouting kids, and meet other needs.
For any complete talk about love, we have to say what we do with our time, energy, and abilities in exchange for money and various other practical and mental rewards. I tricycle buggy loads of faith and optimism in central Columbus, when the bars close, and at concerts, games, and festivals. As a relatively privileged beast of burden, I imagine solidarity with dusty horses, sandy camels, muddy mules, and snowy dogs, and brown chiseled humans in Bangladesh.
Pedicabbing is a labor of love. Nearly without exception, a day or night with some or a lot of it improves my faith in humanity. On top of, and rarely instead of paying me with money, people thank me, shake my hand, punch my arm, and pat me on the back. Occasionally, there are back rubs, hugs, and even simple friendly kisses, in addition to offerings of food, drink, and souvenirs. It’s showing and appreciating human warmth, not an ego trip. I gift and barter rides when I can, to feel spiritually rich. My customers generally pay what they feel good about paying after negotiating a price. All that and the fact that it’s human-powered transport, instead of climate-damaging, air-polluting automobile travel is part of the intrinsic reward of this type of labor of love.
There many extrinsic ones two, which I intend to write about in later posts to this thread. What the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of your job and whatever other labors of love you do ?
As for me, a 44-year-old peddicabbie, I would like to think I’ll see as a labor of love whatever job I might have during the remainder of my life. I expect to make it ‘right livelihood’ as Buddhists say, as a means for meeting love-based goals, even if the job is not intrinsically rewarding. We’ll see, maybe.
We don’t, per se, live to eat, sleep, or fuck. We don’t live to write, cook, garden, sing, paint, design, build, listen, talk, sell houses, rebuild transmissions, perform surgery, wait tables, or pedicab, or fight to end oppression of animals (including humans). In the final analysis (and synthesis ?), we live to love.
Perhaps, to live (or more precisely, to choose to continue to live) is the ultimate labor of love, that a trove of derivative labors comprises.
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