Living to work – or something else?
A story I’ll always remember my grandad telling me before he died was about his own father, who when faced with unemployment found a job about 15 miles away.
Details of what my great grandfather professions was are fuzzy to my overloaded brain, but judging be the time in history, where my family is from, and our working class background, I’ve made the assumption it involved physical labour.
According to my grandad, every morning at 4am his dad would wake up and cycle those 15 miles to get to his job, and some point return later into the evening return home, after a long hard cycle in all weathers.
Enough time to eat, sleep, and repeat again the next day.
When I first heard this I thought “that’s a shame living to work.”
But was it really?
Was it more living to ensure your family’s survival?
I never met my great grandad, and even if I’d ever had the pleasure of the opportunity I’d probably have been too young to understand his personality, so again I’m assuming his reason these conditions wasn’t through love of working, but out of dedication and love for his family to live.
Reasons to be grateful
Hearing my grandad’s story of his father’s dedication,… sacrifice to provide has always been a major perspective setter in my own working career.
When facing a bad day, being grateful for the security my job provides.
When thinking my job is bad, being grateful to be indoors, in a warm cosy room,
When not feeling like I get enough time with family, being grateful I’ve worked from home for the last few years so my youngest doesn’t even know that commuting to a place of work is normal!
When wishing I could have more money, being grateful I’ve got enough to provide a secure life.
When feeling a lack of challenge, being grateful my job is not routine, and recognising I’ve had the privilege of working closer towards self-actualisation than probably anyone in my family’s history.
Everyone deals with challenges differently
It’s acceptable to feel down in yourself when faced with challenge and adversity.
Just because your problem may seem small, doesn’t make your feelings wrong – everyone handles challenges differently.
But gratitude has the power to help you face this.
For me, I’ve managed to work through a lot of problems by putting it into perspective looking at the bigger picture.
- Will it matter in a year?
- It could be worse!
- Did it kill me? Did someone die?
These are all ways I shift my mindset to stop wallowing in pity, pushing on, and facing the big issues.
And through the power of gratitude, I reflect on each situation and think about reasons to be grateful.
“At least I’m not cycling 15 miles on a dark, early, cold morning in order for my family to live.”
What are your reasons to be grateful?
Perfect Manifesto 
When I used to think I was a loser and was the reason why everything went wrong, I had a hard time feeling grateful, I was too full of self-blame. Once I worked on my inner issues and learned to have a healthier and more balanced view of myself and life, I discovered I felt very grateful for so many things in my life. Our inner feelings about ourselves can affect if we feel gratitude for the outer things in our lives.
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Working on yourself is such an essential thing to focus on first before you try to do anything else. Even advice like trying to look at things to be grateful for might seem a difficult task if you’re struggling and/or self-depreciative about yourself.
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Yes, exactly! When I was depressed I had people telling me to just be grateful, but in that state of mind I struggled to see the positives, mostly because my inner negative talk drowned it out. The inner work to teaching myself to like myself in order to not be so harsh and critical with myself was really hard, but I’m now very grateful that I did, for I can now speak kindly to myself whereas before I just couldn’t bring myself to.
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