Daily Ground
Work has been a roller coaster over the past four weeks, and the peaks haven’t been too high. On the one hand, the project I’ve been spending time on has been pretty cool and imminently useful, and I’ve been the first of my department to dip my toes into a newish programming framework. That’s been a breath of fresh air, and useful to me and to the software I’m writing. But on the other hand, in different areas of this task’s parent project I’ve had a couple of false starts and a rug or two pulled out from under me. Don’t get me wrong — I usually like what I do, and I like my coworkers a lot… but it’s hard to feel like the work you’re doing is necessary or even valuable when things of this nature happen one right after the other.
This certainly isn’t a new feeling — at one time or another, everyone has ideas whose legs are swept out from underneath them, right? Last week I heard a song that crystallized these feelings perfectly, and at the perfect time. That song was “When My Time Comes” by Dawes, and when I heard it my first thought was “Where’s this song been for the past month?” It has a certain anthemic quality that I think we can all identify with, and my ears are addicted to the sloooooow triplets in the chorus’s drum fill. The song’s video is equally great, thanks to its vintage tones, its Cool Hand Luke reference, and the sun-drenched backlighting used in so many shots.
More than anything, though, the lyrics really resonated with me due to the situation I’ve found myself in and some of the feelings I’ve described above. I like the incessant struggle that it portrays: we work… we toil… we think we’re capable of accomplishing great things or that we’re owed success… and yet our best-laid plans can see themselves deflated and discarded through no fault of our own in seconds flat.
“What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out.”
— Ecclesiastes 1:3-4, 8:17
hey, man. great post. i think everyone can identify with that sisyphus-type cycle that is work. we’re going through ecclesiastes right now in our college bible study. it can certainly calbirate our perspective to the things eternal. hang in there, man–i’ll be praying for you.