Perfection of The Life, the Work, or Both?

3.01.10 By Neema Avashia

The intellect of man is forced to choose/perfection of the life, or of the work/And if it take the second must refuse/A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. –Yeats

Over February break, I read this amazing book by Abraham Verghese called Cutting for Stone.  It’s a fictional tale of doctors and nurses working at a hospital in Ethiopia, so has virtually nothing to do with teaching in Boston, but it led me to the Yeats poem quoted above, a part of which puts into words something I’ve been grappling with a lot lately.

This is my 7th year working in the Boston Public Schools. And for the first 6 of those years, I would say that I spent the vast majority of my waking hours working. My sister used to try to get me to explore non-work-related activities by saying, “Neema, what would you do if you weren’t working so much?” And I would look at her blankly and say, “I honestly have no idea.” I wasn’t lying—my brain was so full of school, and kids, and teaching and learning, that it simply didn’t have room for anything else.

That’s the thing about teaching—it’s a profession that can be all-consuming, and never-ending. There is always more you can be doing. There are always things to improve upon. There are relationships that continually need to be maintained, and instructional practices that never cease to need refinement. And for the most part, this is precisely what I love about the work. It’s the reason why I’m never bored, the reason why my work never gets old, never seems repetitive, and never loses its profound power to transform both my life, and the lives of my students.

So for the past 6.5 years, every time I’ve been given the choice of perfection of the life versus perfection of the work, I’ve chosen work. And my work, as a result, has gotten pretty damn good. But my life? It could use some work. So I’ve committed to taking some time for myself, both to revive some hobbies that have gotten lost along the way, and to invest, and re-invest, in relationships that sustain me.

In short, I’ve been striving for higher levels of perfection of the life, and struggling with feeling the pull of work every moment that I’m not doing it. And as I search for models to help me navigate this paradox, I’ve not been able to find them. I know a lot of fulfilled workaholics, and a lot of fulfilled lifeaholics, but not many people who manage to do both well…

Sustainability in teaching is something that I think about a lot—how to keep going in this work in the long run, and what it will take to keep me, and other teachers like me, in the profession. It’s something of an obsession, both because I need to find answers for myself, and because it’s a topic that very few policymakers seem to be handling with any level of nuance.

This, then, has become my newest quest: To defy Yeats, and to find a middle path that marries perfection of the life with perfection of the work, instead of being forced to choose. And while I’m doing this for myself, first and foremost, I like to think that I’m also doing it for all the other BTR-trained workaholic teachers out there, many of whom wrestle with the life/work question in much the same way I do.