Apprenticeship.

As a child, I hated work. Work was chores: picking up your clothes, cutting grass, raking leaves, shoveling snow. I saw those things as tedious, meaningless, and imposed by an authority, my parents, or the nuns who forced me to read and write. I copied my rows of letters and words, boringly over and over, but I hated every stroke, which showed in my penmanship, and is part of my handwriting style to this day. (Copying drawings of elk and wolves from outdoor magazines was a different matter, lots of fun, but not the assignment.

I kept myself apart from the spirit of the job, going through the motions only, quick to duck out. It was going to be hard work for me to learn to work. In those days, the 1950s, a high school kid could easily try out an assortment of odd jobs. I was a clerk in a hardware store--endless long hours watching customers deliberate, or tapping wire screens into frames, all in the dusty, acrid smell of fertilizer--and drove a truck for a painting company. The first few days there was a rush of new streets and new scenes, but it soon settled down to the same old routes and routines.

The job I had for four summers with a suburban department of public works, along with a gang of high school buddies, was my first taste of satisfying work. There was hard labor at times--collecting trash, trimming trees, cutting grass--but there were lavish helpings of leisure, too--learning the art of leaning motionless on a spade for hours, drinking in the sun and the breeze, or retiring to the shade each day at 2:30 for a cool half-hour quart of beer. My hands grew thick callouses, my legs and back grew strong, so that any task--even strolling down the street--was easy. Working on the D.P.W. crew gave me equality in the fraternity of workers, many of them full-timers in their forties and fifties. These "old guys" had their strengths and weaknesses. Some of them seemed to me prodigies of physical strength, endurance, or bargaining shrewdness. But up close I saw that they cut corners and goofed off just as much as we kids did, which put us on an equal footing, and made me feel grown-up.

About the same time, I enjoyed a Jesuit high school which had a reputation for hard work and high standards. As in the D.P.W., I admired the old Jebbies' knowledge and discipline, which corresponded with the usual notion of work, but I also saw that some of these same old Jebbies had a love of chewing the fat and hanging out, just like the boys. Some had a passion for the precise Latin declension, the eccentric historical fact, or le mot juste. They showed me that work is a labor of love, and getting it right means something. I began to join in the spirit of the job; it was me doing it, not someone else.

In college, when I needed more money, I worked in factories, a soft drink plant, a cardboard box plant, shift work at times, and I felt in my bones how numbing the repetition, noise, and weird hours were. I and hundreds of co-workers stumbled in circles like zombies at 2 A.M. Even there, people clung to their individuality: the old Polish dervish lady who made a point of turning out more boxes than anyone else (without an obvious incentive), the pasty-faced young man ("Smolinski!") who smiled fixedly and didn't let our teasing get to him, the middle-aged man who always brought a "fancy" lunch of hot soup or stew in a thermos.

I was born blessed with a powerful imagination, but this imagination was a curse, too. Faced with any decision, I could always think of multiple problems and alternatives, and I tended to get bogged down in indecision. Jobs offered me the chance to plunge into the stream of daily action, and to learn by doing, rather than trying to figure everything out ahead of time.

The decision for a lifetime career was, of course, an overwhelming challenge for me. I got around that by pretending to myself that I was taking up medical school as a part-time job, perhaps for a few summers like the D.P.W., and so backed into a medical career. Cramming my head with chemical formulas was like practicing the Palmer method, equally boring, but going on the wards in white coats was joining the adult world again. Work with patients who counted on me gave me a motive to help them, and when I walked the hospital corridors at 2 A.M. I felt grown-up, responsible, more or less awake, and entirely there (though terrified, often enough).

Psychiatry was more abstract, interior, but fit my love of watching personalities, and I came across a definition of "work" in the psychotherapeutic process which rings true: work is the effort to push against my fear, dig deeper, and speak out, even though I am afraid.

Medicine and psychiatry are complex and deep enough that some practitioners bury themselves in them, never emerging into other interests. I welcomed the identity of scientist and helper, but found that in addition to plunging in, there's an advantage in pulling out, too. Even plunging into yard work or household chores can be a satisfying break from a steady diet of psychiatry.

If work is a way to step into action, to mark the world, then the size of my mark may be relatively small, not much greater than cutting grass or stamping a few boxes. Still, I am the one who decides to do it, and the job gives me another way to know the world.

Work is the hard skin between tender ideas and the stubborn world.

William Houghton, M.D., practices psychiatry in Milwaukee.