Let your work and story move toward redemption
Rembrandt, About Time, and a girl named Slushie
This is part two of a two-part series exploring the reciprocity between our public work and personal tension. You can read part one here.
Nearly all the summer camp counselors my wife works with are college girls. Then there’s Slushie (great camp name). Slushie is a teacher who spends her summers at camp so she can invest in more kids.
Last week at camp there was a girl with Down syndrome. She wouldn’t go to the next part of camp unless you told her a party was at the destination. Thankfully, this is summer camp and there are always parties everywhere. I saw the girl walking around campus a couple of times, and I noticed Slushie was with her. It made sense when I learned that Slushie is a special education teacher.
A few weeks ago, I shared an essay exploring how our work shows and shapes our insides: our values and our stories. When our basic needs are met and we have the privilege of choosing our job, our choice of work reveals who we are and who we want to become. Even if you view your work as purely a means to a paycheck, that reveals a value you hold.
Noticing the relationship between our public work and our inner lives is important for two reasons. First, if you want to change your values or your character, consider changing your job. You become what you do. Therefore, your work might be the most formative practice in your life. Two, a person’s job can give you a glimpse into their inner life. Often, our hands are trying to heal the wounds we’ve experienced. You can see this in Slushie.
When I heard Slushie works full-time in special-ed, I knew there had to be something inside her that led to her choosing that line of work. Then I learned about her family. Slushie’s a triplet. And one of her sisters was born with spina bifida. Living with and loving someone with a disability is Slushie’s normal way of life. When you know this part of her background, her career choice makes a lot more sense. Her work reveals her story.
Life in two acts
Here’s one of the most unfortunate patterns I see in the workforce: Young talent spends their most valuable resources (time and focus) on problems not worth solving. They receive a surplus of external rewards but feel like they’re deficient on the inside. They eventually find themselves wanting to work on something that matters — something that moves them and creates real change beyond themselves. So they take on new work that tackles more worthy causes. The first half of their life is about them; the second half is about others. You can see this in the life of Rembrandt.
When Rembrandt was 29, he painted himself into the Bible’s most famous parable, The Prodigal Son. Out of all the moments in the Prodigal Son’s story, he chose to reflect himself as the wayward son enjoying himself in a brothel (seen below). And that woman giving him a lap dance? That’s his wife Saskia (weird flex, but okay). Rembrandt painted “The Prodigal Son in the Brothel” in their first year of marriage when he was soaking up personal and professional success.
Over the next 30 years, Rembrandt suffered terribly. Three of his four children didn’t survive infancy. His wife Saskia died after giving birth to their only living son. Rembrandt’s housekeeper and dear friend died. His new romantic partner died. And he fell into bankruptcy, selling his house to survive.
After this long season of suffering, he chose to paint the prodigal son again — from a radically different perspective.
But where did Rembrandt put himself in this painting?
Is he the humbled son whose face we can’t see?
The indignant brother in the shadows?
The gentle father extending forgiveness?
Yes. Rembrandt has been all three.
There was a 30-year gap between his two paintings of the same parable. And in those 30 years, his outer work and inner life kept shaping each other. His life’s circumstances humbled him and his paintings did the same.
The first half of Rembrandt’s life was about personal pleasure and accumulation. But the second half was about humility and acceptance. Rembrandt had a redemptive second act. This happens to a lot of us.
In one of my favorite books, The Second Mountain, NYT writer David Brooks makes sense of this typical life journey.
Brooks explains how we’re prone to spend the first half of our lives climbing the mountain of personal glory. This mountain is marked by achieving and accumulating. We climb up it to impress others and earn approval, convinced that happiness and belonging are at the peak. On our way up this mountain, one of two things happens to us: we either get knocked down the mountain by a tragedy or we make it to the top and realize the reward isn’t there. Either way, we’re left unsatisfied. Then we look up to notice a second mountain. This mountain is one of commitment and service. This mountain invites you to give away your life to people and causes rather than pursuing personal gain and glory. The second mountain brings what we’ve always really wanted: the happiness that comes from a deeply rooted life of service to others.
There’s always hope for pursuing redemptive public and inner work. And while I love seeing stories of redemptive second acts, I think there’s a better option. The option to avoid bad quests entirely.
A solution: Live your first act like it’s your second
[Spoiler alert: I’m going to tell the ending to ‘About Time,’ one of my favorite movies.]
In About Time, Domhnall Gleeson inherits the ability to time travel. His dying dad tells him the secret to using the power to live a good life:
“Live every day again almost exactly the same. The first time with all the tensions and worries that stop us noticing how sweet the world can be, but the second time noticing.”
You then see a tear-jerking montage of Domhnall Gleeson noticing. From his friends to strangers, he notices. Even you as the viewer feel more peace and fulfillment from noticing him notice. It’s amazing.
But there’s one more twist: he discovers a way to one-up his dad.
“And in the end, I think I've learned the final lesson from my travels in time; and I've even gone one step further than my father did. The truth is I now don't travel back at all, not even for the day. I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.”
Our protagonist learns to live his present day as if he’s had the opportunity to come back to it. He lives his first act as if it was his second.
A question to live by
We are more than the work we do, but how we spend our time shapes us. And since work takes up nearly half of our waking hours, it’s a primary shaper of our lives and our stories.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard
Long after you're gone, the first thing people will see about you is your birthdate and death date. The space between those dates is filled with the work you do as time squeezes you to death. And it’s that work that reveals your insides: your values, your tensions, and your story.
What story will your work tell?
✌️
— Luke
P.S. If you want to do a deeper dive on Rembrandt’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” you should check out Henri Nouwen’s book. It’s small but mighty.