Life In The Loops

“A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.” – Proverbs 10:4

“People underestimate the importance of diligence as a virtue. No doubt this has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as ‘the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.’” – Atul Gawande, Better

I have no qualms about staying at home more than being a physician, but it is strange to have trained for over twelve years for an entirely different thing than what I do now most of the time. I found during training that in the world of medicine at least, I am at heart a surgeon: I thrive best employing mind and fingers, knowledge and artistry, to achieve visible results and progress. At home, if there’s action that needs to be taken in a crisis, I’m great: figure out if a cut from a fall needs stitches or just steri-strips; get four kids, four backpacks, one cello loaded into the van in minutes.

But that’s not most of life at home. Most of life is a litany of unremarkable, mindlessly Sisyphean tasks. Packing lunchboxes only to have to clean them out and pack them again. Dropping off kids only to pick them up only to drop them off again. Cleaning things only to have them get dirty again—counters, towels, sheets, dishes, children, clothes, floors. Teeth. I actually had this moment where I realized that having four children meant keeping 128 teeth clean (and straight) over the course of 23 years. 

Medicine does not exactly train you for this. At my previous job in private practice, the mantra was, “physicians should only do what only physicians can do.” I had two scribes with me in clinic, two assistants in the operating room; I didn’t have to touch paperwork, drape the patient, do anything except call out orders or hold out my hand for instruments or lenses. This wasn’t to be nice to us, but to work us harder, through a higher volume of patients and cases, and the pace was anything but mundane.

But at home, mundane is the language of love. Repetition speaks. My vocation is found in doing again what I did before, choosing again what I chose before. A word for this perhaps is diligence. The Hebrew word charuwts has an interesting double-meaning: literally, it means “to dig” (as in a ditch—which makes me think of Brooks’ phrase, “digging the damn ditch”) or “to sharpen” (as in, a threshing-sledge, for agricultural work). Labor-intensive, repetitive, mundane work. But charuwts can also be translated “gold,” as indeed it is in four of the nine times it occurs in the book of Proverbs. No one is sure why—because gold is dug out? Because gold has a sharp or bright color? It certainly adds a bit of poetic redundancy to this verse.

Diligence is not necessarily a vaunted virtue. It is often not seen, or credited. But it is of great value, and it leads to what is valuable. And this proverb praises not “diligence,” but “the hand of the diligent.” Diligence in action is how we live out faithfulness, how we demonstrate love, how we steward well what we’ve been entrusted with. There are days when I feel like all I do is wash dishes: which I mean less as complaint than a statement of fact. Six people eating three meals and, some of them, three snacks a day go through a lot of dishes. But at least right now, this is where I sense God wants me to be: washing the dishes, with the hand of the diligent. Living life in the loops, and believing in the value of it.