Lucy’s fun afternoon at my office reminds me that work needs play

By David McElroy · November 16, 2018

If you had stopped at the office of Bluff Park Realty in Birmingham, Ala., Friday afternoon, you might have met a furry new worker. Lucy is now trained in greeting customers at the front counter. She earned her treats and she had a good time.

I knew things would be slow on the Friday before Thanksgiving, so it was a good day for her to have a fun trip out. I was in the office for only four hours, so it was long enough for her to have a break from her normal routine but not so long that she would be unhappy.

I think both of us had fun.

I grew up believing that work was fun. I was excited about the things I planned to do — things other people consider work — and it never occurred to me that work could be boring. Having Lucy around this afternoon left me thinking about what changed for me along the way — and about what still needs to change.

I saw work as a creative thing. I don’t just mean artistic creation. I mean it in the sense of creating companies and creating wealth and inventing the future — building my own empire. Work was about doing things that hadn’t been done before. There are a dozen different things which I seriously wanted to do with my life, because everything seemed exciting.

For me, good work was fun — because achievement was fun.

Maybe it’s just symbolic, but it seems as though that changed when I was working in politics. Once I started political consulting, I made more money than ever — but the work meant nothing. There were parts of it that I enjoyed — especially the parts related to competing and winning — but for the most part, I was just doing something boring because I was paid a lot of money to do it.

Before I got into politics, I was still striving and scheming about bigger things all the time, not just to survive or be paid for something someone else wanted. I worked very long hours — when nobody else was paying me — simply because my dreams were so exciting.

I think that’s the connection I’m drawing to Lucy’s visit today. She was excited about the trip just as soon as we headed to the car. (That’s her in the car on the way to the office.) I realize that a dog doesn’t do abstract thinking in the way way that you and I do, but she wasn’t trying to please anybody. She was just experiencing the pure joy that comes from expressing herself in a new way.

That’s what I used to bring to my work. I was like an excitable puppy on each new day and each new project. Yes, I had terrible days at times. I got exhausted and was unhappy at times. But, overall, I had boundless determination — and I had fun in the long-term sense — because I believed I was going somewhere worth going.

Somehow, I lost track of my desire to create. Maybe I lost faith in myself because I was immersed in the political cess pool. Maybe I got so lost in making that six-figure political income that I forgot why I had ever wanted to create big things. And then when I got off track for so long — spending 20 years in politics — I was so badly off course that I didn’t know how to get back when I finally left the cess pool.

I have to find the joy that I used to feel about work. We spend the majority of our waking hours on earning a living. Something is wrong if we spend most of the week counting down the days until the weekend — when we can do things we care about and avoid the things we’re simply being paid to do.

By the end of Lucy’s time at the office today, she was getting ready to go home. By about 4:45 p.m., she was sitting just outside my office and giving me the look — see it below — which tells me it’s time to move on.

If you’re doing the right things with your life, work is fun. At least, that’s been my experience. I need to get back to that point — the one at which chasing goals with someone you love can be enough to make you excited to get up in the morning.

I really miss feeling that way about work.

Note: All three of the pictures of Lucy here can be enlarged to a bigger size with a click or tap. Go ahead. She’s a gorgeous and sweet lady who deserves to be appreciated.

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I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

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