Our Common Life

On just doing the work and being nothing special

When I was a teenager, my grandmother gave me the skill of sewing. I was only half-listening, and I didn’t love it, but I did learn. Ever since then, in every year in every season of life, I have found it useful and even lucrative. These days I frequently hem pants for my neighbor and make necessary alterations for myself and my friends. I’m not great at it. I remember my grandmother giving me a little hook, saying, Sarie, this is your seam-ripper. This is your new best friend. She knew me well. Too quick, easily distracted, yet eager to be in her company, doing whatever she had a mind for us to do.

She believed sewing was a necessary womanly skill, one I would need, and she was right. One issue I have with modern parenting, and modern thinking in general is this idea that we are special and amazing and talented in some way. It’s like we have an untapped greatness somewhere inside us that is just waiting to be discovered. So we take our kids to karate and then dance and then robotics club and so on, giving them every opportunity to be incredible, only to realize at some point that they are, like their parents and grandparents before them, incredibly average.

To illustrate, there is a Christian podcaster I appreciate in many ways who often says, “Do the next right thing in faith and excellence and for the glory of God!” This is a great goal, but I can’t be alone in cringing when I hear it. Excellence? There is no way. I can shoot for it. But in reality, I’m doing the next right thing as best as I can. Excellence does not, will not, can not, define most of us, but hopefully faithfulness and love. Those are better goals, I think.

And so, dear reader, if you are a parent, just know that it’s okay for your children to be average, and to be not particularly great yourself. What the world needs is people who have the skills and willingness to do the work that is needed and obvious, the eyes to see what that is and the gratitude to appreciate what has been done by others, for their sake.

Thinking on these things, I remembered this piece I wrote years ago, and I hope you enjoy it!

Our Common Life, 2018

In the loft of my parent’s house, I work part-time as a seamstress for an ultra-lightweight hiking apparel company. I do this in the evenings when everyone is asleep and I listen to podcasts, often about infectious diseases or conspiracy theories, which serve as a substitute for coffee. It’s hard to fall asleep on the job when the little grey cells are busy with the incoming news that Bigfoots (the correct plural) prefer Poptarts to just about anything else, and if I miss out on the history of hantavirus in Finland while the machine is going, I really haven’t missed anything. This is noise. It’s fun, sure, if you like that sort of thing. But it hasn’t produced anything in me, useful or beautiful.

So I cut it off last night, to listen to the house I could live in blind on the dark hilltop, but it was freezing outside for the first time in many weeks, and all was quiet, even the spring peepers. I didn’t think of anything for awhile but the fabric and pattern, the razor blade and pins. None of the bearded men on Youtube need pins, but I do. I sat down to make the round stitch for the heel, then laid it on my lap to secure to the next piece for the final seam. After that, I could be done. That’s when I noticed all the seams on my overalls.

I’ve never told you about the sewing before. There’s no shame in it, but as Reb Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof, it’s no great honor either. I’m thankful for the job, but it’s just a job, and one that doesn’t bring me into fellowship with people who have stories. Except for when, in the quiet of the loft, I see that it does. It is no great thing to be an invisible worker, just one of many thousands at a post in an assembly line or a girl winding a bobbin in a dark house, unless people are born naked.

Look down at your seams dear reader for a moment and remember that “our common life depends upon each other’s toil,” as the Book of Common Prayer says, and consider how the life of that seamstress has touched your own and answered your want, and how the work you do not love to do, might be the most needful.