Don't Bother Me Honey, I'm Working!
Don't Bother Me Honey, I'm Working!
by Eugene Linden
It used to be so easy for a husband to justify his working life. He went off in the morning and then returned that evening. What he did during the day constituted "work." While wives, who took care of the house and family, might fairly ask who had the harder job, most arguments remained low in intensity so long as "work" paid the bills. The potential for conflict has risen in recent decades since many wives now work at jobs during the week and still do most of the housework. When the working wife is a lawyer, however, and the husband is a writer, the potential for conflict rises to infinity.
To begin with lawyers are not known for shying from an argument, and then with a New York lawyer for a wife there is always the issue of how much money a writer's "work" brings in. As for the balance of power? In an argument about what constitutes a hard days work, a lawyer wife is the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and the writer is Costa Rica, which gave up its armed forces decades ago.
Or so it would appear. May I humbly submit, however, that perception is not always reality. An outsider (or wife) observes a writer at work and sees a guy slumped in front of a screen for a few hours a day between long breaks for lunch, golf/tennis/windsurfing, and other activities more suited to the leisure class. This is an understandable misunderstanding, but the great preponderance of those activities that the lawyer wife sees as procrastination or outright laziness are actually vital parts of the writer's work. For instance:
Lying in bed in the morning. To the lawyer wife the snoozing writer-husband appears to be nothing more than the embodiment of sloth, but for the writer this period between sleep and waking is the most precious part of the day and should be prolonged as much as possible. The virtues of the so-called "alpha state" between waking and consciousness have been well documented. During this period the barriers between the unconscious and conscious mind are porous, and the brain, which has been working throughout the writer's vital nine hours of sleep, presents metaphors, solutions to writing problems and other ideas as a gift to the new day. Try and use this valuable work time, however, when you have two babies and three cats marauding on the bed and the only other creature in the room who speaks English is your wife exhorting you to get up!
The two hour lunch. Writing is a solitary profession, but it is critically dependent that the writer be in touch with mercurial shifts in the zeitgeist as well as be aware of the constant reshuffling of editors at publishing houses and magazines. The lawyer, grabbing a sandwich at her desk, might dismiss a writer's lunch as little more than gossip, griping, backbiting, and complaints about money, but initiates to the ritualized dialogue of publishing, recognize a rich tapestry of New Business Development, Forward Planning, Strategic Positioning, Marketing, and a host of other productive activities. No wonder the lunch takes a chunk out of the day! In a corporation, any one of these functions would require an entire department to fulfill, but the writer can adeptly dispense with all of them during the course of one meal.
The break for tennis. Just because lawyers cannot bill time spent on the courts, they tend to look down upon those who take a couple of hours in the afternoon to clear their heads and restore their hearts. The British, a group who understand the vital importance of non-traditional work activities, have long recognized that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Exercise stimulates blood flow to the brain, invigorating renewed creative activity, and, it bears mentioning, it also helps reduce the lingering effects of drinks imbibed during the earlier sessions of New Business Development, Forward Planning, and Marketing.
The weekly poker game. Admittedly, the work aspects of poker are not intuitively obvious, but keep in mind that poker is as much as about wit and badinage as it is about winning (or perhaps losing) money. Poker thus serves to condition the writer's most important "muscle."
I could go on but let me instead confront head-on the billable hours mentality that has so stigmatized writers and others who opt off the treadmill. Leisure, not necessity, is the mother of invention. Christophe Boesch, a Swiss field biologist who has studied chimpanzees in the Tai forest in the Ivory Coast, has argued that the most innovative groups of chimpanzees are the ones with the richest diet, and hence, the most free time. Freed from the constant search for food, they have the leisure to test new ape ideas, and the well-nourished Tai chimps have shown ingenuity in developing nut cracking and monkey hunting techniques. Applied to humans, this suggests a solution to the impasse over what constitutes work: lawyers should keep writers well-nourished so they can explore new directions, an arrangement that in essence leverages the optimum skills of both writer/husband and lawyer/wife.
