Wisdom from Toni Morrison

I was listening to an interview on public radio (Kurt Anderson's "Studio 360") in which Hilton Als of The New Yorker was talking to Toni Morrison, the novelist, essayist and professor emeritus at Princeton.

Just mentioning those three names, you know they weren't talking about how sad it is that Jennifer Aniston is getting a divorce or which Kardashian had a baby.

They talked about the experience that comes with age, and the fact that some people don't even hit their stride until they are into middle age. And experience comes from hearing things such as what Ms Morrison heard her father say one day.

He was a shipyard welder during World War II and he came home from work one day, telling her that he had made such a perfect seam on the hull of a ship he was helping to build that the took the time to sign his work!

And she, a teenager at the time, wondered why he signed his name in a place that no one would ever see. And he told her that all that mattered was that HE knew he did a good job.  Acclaim and applause from the people around us is one thing, but what really matters is the satisfaction of doing something right. And you can't fake that sort of satisfaction.

Toni Morrison also said that she worked as a young woman, cleaning the house of a crabby, fractious older woman who griped and groused all the while. She told her father about this, and her father said, "So! You don't live there! Go to work, earn your money, and come home to be happy!"

I know so many people who have devoted themselves to some corporation or some entity and have given up their own lives to try, usually in vain, to satisfy some employer. I probably won't ever be asked to deliver any commencement addresses, but I would tell people just that same thing that Toni's father told her. 

Your work is what pays for your life. It isn't your life.