I am bemused by the notion that there are some who lift weights and hustle along treadmills with fervor and devotion. Moreover, there are many who consider the activity they endure each day with distaste.  “Work” is sometimes assailed as “labor”.  In the sense that criminals are condemned to “hard” labor as their lot for committing sins against society they must work as punishment rather than being given work.  “Labor”, a universal experience by birthing mothers, is an unlovely but necessary experience at the end of gestation.

Our whole notion of work has changed over the millennia.  Man worked from sun to sun while a woman's work was never done is the popular reduction of life to a descriptive summation.  One had to work for his bread.  Man had to work to put food on his children’s table.  Then, man became part of a force, a labor force and a commodity that could be bought and sold.  Man in the thousands and millions became a political weapon through unions and associations while a few men controlled fortunes selfishly and sought to gain power politically as is the fashion throughout time.  Women, a work force secondary to the chief breadwinners have only recently become something more than a household slavey necessary to keep the hearth swept, the table filled and the clothes washed and mended.

Whether work or labor, activity is life. Activity ennobles us and it is better to work than be without it. I spent one of the days of the Labor Day Weekend doing nothing and I regretted every moment of it.  I did not write and did not accomplish a thing except to eat and ride ten miles on my bicycle.  That activity redeemed the entire day although it happened before the sun rose.  I suppose I needed to nap and rest but – to spend the rest of the day in viewing mindless television shows and sneaking moments to watch the tennis people endlessly hitting yellow balls back and forth between them – was mind deadening. I desperately wished for the ability to take a walk and get out in the heat of the day. That last is not a thing to wish for because the heat will reduce you to a puddle while my system cannot walk more than two blocks before my hips and back complain bringing me to a halt.

The universal Catholic Church during the middle ages made work an ennobling thing.  There was something to the sanctity of “labor”. It was at that time that the world of business found itself being born when “factors”, men of vision, could gather workers together, freed from their hearth and home, and herd them into “factories” where they were turned into a computable cost of production. They were no longer a “noble” thing but something bought cheaply because life had so little value.

In conclusion, whether work or labor, activity is often a blessing.