beastofburden

Beast of burden

by Bob on May 11, 2007

Walking through downtown Boston today, carrying my heavy backpack, with its "who only knows what is inside of it anymore" chracteristics, I found myself, as I looked up to the State House, playing the Stones 1978 song "Beast of Burden" in my head, sans iPOD mind you, as always. And amidst the rush hour crowds, one felt quite impressively like a modern beast of burden. That's an odd bit. I thought of how I and so many others carry around a lot, but some or most of it never is taken out. It's just in the bag so it can be potentially taken out ! Books and papers and the like live a dark monastic existence in such a dark catacomb of a backpack.

I reflected on what it meant in our world and prior times, to actually be a beast of burden whilst the Stones song played on and on in my head.

I remembered that a working definition of a "beast of burden" is a kind of "working animal". And I looked around me. And I saw a plentitude of working animals except they were wearing three piece suits and real or supposedly designer label clothes and had heavy bags, even if they were of the finest leather from Italy or from simple cheap parachute material from impecunious-minded consumer Chinatown shops.

Then there is a question in this off-shore-out-sourced world of ours, just if we are living a world of a kind of mock-slavery of the working person. Most people seem to not want to be in their job, but can't think of how to leave it, hating it all the time. But they have over-spent and perhaps in debt. Or on the edge.

My heavy backpack began to feel heavier metaphorically and literally.

Then I remembered some years ago whilst working at a company in New York City, that twice a week a man would come to tend to the corporate plants and flowers we had in our offices. The larger the plant, the higher up in the organisation you were. Now this urbane urban outside-contractor of a gardener was a very quiet man. He would water the plants in my office, inspect the leaves, and make sure all was well. I felt like I should ask him not to do it but it was a corporate mandate and he had a long-standing contract. I wondered as a quintessentially competitive New Yorker just how much money he could make doing that. He must have had a lot of corporate clients. Just him alone, no helpers. One day I chatted him up and we had a nice conversation. He was very happy with what he was doing and quite competent at horticulture. As we ended the conversation, and I had a meeting to attend to, he looked at me with a smile of sympathy yet somewhat sardonic, and said "Bob, I used to work in a big corporation just like you, but I gave it up for this. I am happier now doing this simple job. I can sleep at night." And then I knew. He had given up being a beast of burden. We were quite friendly after that.

I also saw a nice young corporate lady in the train quite intensively reading a book which was entitled "Quit Your Job and Move to Key West: A Complete Guide" by Christopher Shultz and David Sloan. I kind of read it over her shoulder. It had information on Key West in Florida but also was interspersed with little boxes like "Reason to quit #62: My boss is a mental midget who treats me like swill". Now that was pretty amazing. This was a very crowded rush hour train to the South Shore of Boston Harbor and the train was packed. This lady was rather quite serenely sitting down reading this book, whilst another nice young lady was standing having a suffocating panic and anxiety attack, and sundry others were arguing about baseball scores and players. There was a lesson in there somewhere.

Well, a lot of people are not following their bliss. Likely because circumstances do not permit it. But it appears to be causing all kinds of physical and emotional ills if one judges by the sheer number of adverts on radio, TV and in print media, etc. for medicines of all sorts. Some commercials have little cartoon-character-like tiny creatures diving into and coming out of toenails. One can hardly imagine what Charlie the Tuna from the 1960s would say.

I must stop here because I just don't know what to say. It seems that many people are caught in a seemingly no-win situation in their jobs, almost like beasts of burden.

One does recall that some horses have a great smile and camels, too. Maybe they know the syndrome but have a leg up on us humans. And they have made some amazing eco-behavioural adaptations which we might learn from. Had we but world enough and time, as Andrew Marvell wrote in his poem.

Perhaps as a weak counterpoint, later that day, two nice young lady university students were talking on campus about what to have their major subject area in. One said "I think I'll try theatre, because it's so inspired". After all, I thought silently, Shakespeare did inform us quite seriously and literally that all the world is a stage.

So it goes.