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Working to Awaken

© M. Williams

Each morning I crawl out of bed at six thirty, pull on a pair of worn blue jeans and head to the barn to feed, turn out and clean the stalls of the twenty or so horses with whom my mate and I share our lives. I tote the loaded feed buckets two by two down the shed rows, dodge the teeth and feet of thousand pound animals anxious to get at the breakfast I bring and head back for refills, trip after trip. I fit fly masks and halters on excited horses eager to reach the relative freedom of their paddocks, and I walk them, sometimes prancing and rearing, to the fields. When the feeding and turn out are done, I man my pitchfork and wheelbarrow to heave and lift my way towards my own late breakfast. In the winter I shiver my way through the morning routine; in the summer the sweat drips into my eyes.

So why do I do it? Why do I huff and puff, day after day, week after week, when I could easily make a living at something less physically demanding?

Quite simply, I do it to wake up.

We all have to work at something; that's the way of survival in this particular reality. But when the task is tedious and/or strenuous, we have a tendency to labor with a sense of resentment. We think, "Why do I have to do this job? I hate this work. I wish the day were over." And so we begin thinking ahead to the time when the work is done and we are free to do something more enjoyable. This feeling of resentment keeps us from living in the present moment-as we are constantly considering the future point at which the day will end-and thus we remain asleep throughout the entire experience, letting time pass us by.

Yet work is an excellent method for cultivating awareness, if we'd only take advantage of it. Certainly hard work challenges our comfort, and if we can avoid doing it we will, but that very discomfort we avoid can allow the mind to free itself from the confines of habitual existence and reach a state of higher consciousness. Like the runner that breaks through the wall when he thinks himself unable to go another step, our consciousness, too, can experience a sort of second wind and break through the wall of stultifying dullness and misery of the task to gain insight and awareness from it instead.

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