It is Labor Day weekend in the United States, and I’ve been contemplating the notion of labor and work. The word labor connotes hard physical exertion. Work refers to performing a purposeful activity. Transformation usually requires both the emotional and mental equivalent of physical labor. We must unearth unconscious mental mindsets, lift them up, and eventually remove them from our mental spaces when they no longer serve us. Removing a fixed mindset is no easy task.
Just as laborers work in concert with other laborers to successfully perform a task, people engaging in transformational change rarely do it on their own. The lift is too heavy for any one person to shoulder. Whether intrapsychically (narrator, protagonist, various selves and roles) or interpersonally (everyone else), we are always in relationship and never act alone.
Labor Day was originally conceived to honor the contributions of workers, and the blood and sweat it takes for them to continually produce those contributions. In essence, to use the story metaphor, the narrator finally acknowledged the experience of the protagonist of the story. The story of work in the United States was long out of balance. The protagonist’s experience needed to be named and honored.
Labor Day itself offers an example of the importance of relationship. It is celebrated by picnics, parades, and other public gatherings. Ironically, it is a day of respite, of NOT working so that workers can join with their families and/or other workers to honor the fruits of their labors.
It is never enough to solely focus on the results of labor. Nothing is ever produced without a process and people to create it. Even if you are dealing with a totally automated product, a human being initially created the machinery and/or the program to run it. To experience wholeness and the full import of the moment, it behooves us to acknowledge all the players in the story.
Just as it is important interpersonally, it’s equally important to honor our intrapsychic relationships as well. Some parts of us are always more visible and demanding more attention than the others. Yet all parts are contributing to our output as a whole.
Transformation is about honestly taking stock of our internal relationships so that we may enhance all of our intrapsychic and interpersonal relationships. Doing the deep, impactful work of transformation often requires breaking down walls, gutting rooms, and rebuilding the foundation of our internal structure. Developing a new architecture to meet the needs of the present and to plan for the future.
So let us take some time today to honor all the work we all have done to arrive at the structures we’ve currently created. And let us dream about and create new structures that support even more powerful and transformative experiences and stories that honor all the relationships in our lives.
Perhaps Labor Day offers us an invitation beyond simply honoring work. It invites us to notice and honor the relationships that make our work and our lives possible. Labor Day provides an opportunity to recognize the parts of ourselves that have carried us, protected us, resisted us, and pushed us forward. To acknowledge the people whose contributions made our own contributions possible. And perhaps, in that acknowledgment, we create the conditions for transformation: by honestly examining the structures that brought us here and becoming curious about what they were built to do, what they can no longer hold, and what new structures might allow all of us to participate more fully in the story.
How are you honoring the work and labor of your own transformation today?