la·bo·ri·ous
/ləˈbôrēəs/ adjective
1. (especially of a task, process or journey)
requiring considerable effort and time
When I look out the window, I see lots of trees. I like it. I don’t see any sunsets, and our back yard is not very “useable” for its size. But I like it.
One quirk about where we live is that there are a lot of rocks and the soil is mostly clay. This is fine. We’ve been trying to make the yard into our own for the past year or so. This means lots of holes have been dug, either to remove growing things, or to plant growing things. I’ve done some of this digging myself.
The digging has been slow going. More often than not, when I step or jump on a shove to get it into the ground, it stops short because of a rock. So I shift the shovel a little, hoping to get away from the rock, and try jumping again. It’s a little jarring, but it is what it is. It’s not rare for me to have to move the shovel 5-100* times before I can get it down to where I can actually move dirt. (*I might be exaggerating a little.)
A fair amount of holes were dug this way. I went around digging out rose bushes (wild roses) from the slope behind our house. They were in random places and never bloomed because the deer love to eat them. I removed a deer-nibbled Japanese maple tree whose rootstock had sprouted and grown as big as the grafted tree. I took out a willow that had become a dense bush by being snipped back so many times. I dug up landscaping fabric all grown through with periwinkle roots. (Lots more where that came from.)
I learned that a little hand axe was useful because it had a smaller blade so it would miss more of the rocks, but I bent that tool. It worked to use it like a lever to get stubborn roots and rocks dislodged from the hard clay, but it wasn’t meant for that and it didn’t hold up. Concave became convex.
My experience with digging holes changed a lot when I listened to someone explain two different ways of using a pick. You could haul it over your shoulder and swing it down with two hands and all your body weight, then haul it up again. This takes a lot of energy. The other way was to let the weight of the pick work on its own. By lifting the pick a little and letting it drop, even with a much smaller range of motion and a lot less power, the pick could be a much better tool for doing everyday yard work.
Well friends, I hadn’t even considered a pick.
Whenever I see that pick, I’m grateful. I remember my husband calling me on his way home from work from the hardware store to see if the one he was looking at would work. I remember him bringing it home. I remember it being a present. A joke present, yes, but still a present that made me happy. He doesn’t remember it being a present.
In any case, the pick was a game changer. I was about three times faster with the pick.
A lot of this dirt work was done during the day when my husband was at the office. After all, I had hours at home to work in the yard. He was (and still is) encouraging and complimentary of my efforts. One night after he came home from work, we went to the back yard to plant some trees. I told him I would dig first then he could take a turn. It was tiring, after all.
I was a little stunned to see what digging was like for him.
From what I could tell, he was using about 10% of the effort it took for me and was getting about 10 times more work done in the same amount of time. With his strength and body weight, the shovel pushed past the rocks that I got stuck on. There was no jumping on the shovel to try to get it to sink in a little farther.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear suggests because of differences in our DNA, every human will have different aptitudes and strengths. What I’m drawn to and what I enjoy is probably not exactly what you love and what you lose yourself doing. (This is paraphrased and I’m not referring back to the book, so please take it with a grain of salt and give James the credit for all the good and me all the credit for what might be a little off.)
Does he argue that everyone should identify the work that is not only easy for them, but the work that’s enjoyable—or at least that isn’t as painful as it is for other people? I’m not sure I would say he goes that far, but he’s a strong advocate for putting time and effort into finding your niche.
If you find yourself intimately acquainted with laborious work, spending hours and sweating buckets trying to dig holes that others can do in a tenth of the time, are you off track? Is it a waste of time for you and the rest of the world to have you flubbing your way through work that someone else would sail through (and maybe happily)?
I don’t think this is a rhetorical question.
Would the world be a better place if we were all matched to our ideal work? What I find laborious is something you might find invigorating and stimulating, so why do the work that is so hard?
I’ll say this: As a parent (a role that effectively distills all of my most deeply-held beliefs into things I nag our kids about), I absolutely want our children to do things that are hard and downright laborious. I want them to know how hard feels and to know that they can hack it. I want them to know how it feels to plant a tree in a hole you just spent an hour digging. I want them to have blisters and frustration.
And then, after they have had their fair share of in-the-trenches, want-to-stab-yourself-in-the-eye work, I want them to find work, maybe even “work,” that comes easily to them. Work that they can do with one hand tied behind their back and half-asleep. And I want them to knock it out of the park. I want them to push themselves to do wonderful things in the world that they are made for.
Here’s a lovely quote for you. Consider it a prize for reading all the way to the end:
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
