We become better at something in ourselves—more skilled, more creative, more effective—when we work. We discover that, indeed, we are good for something. Good work is, at the time, its own kind of asceticism. It needs no symbolic rituals or contrived penances.
The very act of continuing something until we succeed at it is soul-searing, life-changing enough... It makes us equal partners with the rest of the human race in this one common endeavor to grow the globe to wholeness. Good work is our gift to the future. It is what we leave behind—our persistence, our precision, our commitment, our fidelity to the smallest and meanest of tasks that will change the mind of generations to come about our sacred obligation to bear our share of the holy-making enterprise that is work.
In a talk about compassion, a former teacher of mine once said that practice prepares the mind, but suffering prepares the heart. Perhaps the final step in the healing of all wounds is the discovery of the capacity for compassion, an intuitive knowing that no one is singled out in their suffering, that all living beings are vulnerable to loss, attachment, and limitation. It is only in the presence of compassion that we can show our wounds without diminishing our wholeness. For those who have compassion, woundedness is not a place of judgment but a place of genuine meeting.