The Boring Part Is Most of It

I did an arithmetic one winter that I have never told anybody about and I am going to tell it now because I think it is more use than most things a man my age says.

I worked out roughly what proportion of my year is interesting.

Not enjoyable. Interesting, in the sense of a thing a person would describe to somebody at a supper. Lambing is interesting. A market day is interesting. The morning the roof went was extremely interesting and I would rather it had not been.

I made it about eleven days. Eleven days out of three hundred and sixty five.

The rest is water, feed, walking, mending, waiting, counting, and driving between two places I have driven between about four thousand times. About ninety seven per cent of what I do is a thing I have already done and will do again.

Now, I want to be careful here, because there are two wrong things to say about that number and both of them get said constantly.

The first wrong thing is to say it is tragic, that a life is mostly gray and a man ought to be doing something else. I do not believe that and I have never met a life where it is not the case, including the lives of men who appear on television.

The second wrong thing is worse, and it is to say that if you look at it correctly the boring parts become interesting. They do not. I have looked at them correctly for thirty years and the water is still water.

Toby asked me last year what the best part of farming is. I said the eleven days. He asked what the rest is and I said the rest is the farm.

Bucky, who has been present for a considerable share of the three hundred and fifty four, has never once shown a preference between them, which is either wisdom or the absence of any inner life, and after eleven years I genuinely do not know which.

The instruction from the most honest book

Ecclesiastes is the book that says everything is vanity, repeatedly, at length, and it is not a book anybody would accuse of being cheerful. And the instruction it gives is this.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

Whatsoever thy hand findeth. Not whatever is significant. Not whatever a person would have chosen. Whatever is in front of the hand, which on this farm is a bucket about four thousand times a year.

And the reason given is not that the work is secretly meaningful. The reason given is that there is a limited amount of time in which any of it can be done at all, which is a much soberer reason and is one a person can actually use.

You are being pointed at what is in front of your hand rather than at what is worth doing, and Ecclesiastes 9:10 uses the word whatsoever. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as freedom rather than as resignation.

The same book gives the other half a few chapters earlier, and it is not what people expect from a book about vanity.

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God. (Ecclesiastes 2:24)

From the hand of God. An ordinary day of ordinary work with something to eat at the end of it is described as a gift rather than as a consolation.

You have been given ordinary days as a gift rather than as what was left over. The written word calls that specific arrangement a thing from God's hand, and His Spirit is what makes that read as generosity in a life that is mostly repetition.

What is not being claimed

I want to be exact about what that verse does not do, because a great deal of unhelpful teaching lives in the gap.

It does not say the water becomes interesting. Ecclesiastes never once pretends. It is the book that says there is nothing new under the sun and then goes on to say it about eleven more times.

What it does is put a person's whole weight behind the ordinary thing without lying to them about what it is.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. (Ecclesiastes 9:7)

God now accepteth thy works. Present tense, and about works nobody described and nobody wrote down, in a book that has just finished saying that the same thing happens to everybody in the end.

You are accepted in the middle of the repetition rather than at the end of it. Ecclesiastes 9:7 says now and puts it before any account of what the works were, and the Spirit of God is what makes present tense land on a Tuesday.

You have not been asked to pretend about any of this. Ecclesiastes is honest all the way through and still lands on eating bread with joy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an honest book better company than a cheerful one.