Every day, Hillsdale students pass construction sites on their jaunts to and around campus. While we attend classes, sweat over deadlines, and pore over papers, Weigand Construction workers undertake a different kind of work: physical, rather than intellectual, in its focus. For their efforts, the college already has the Christ Chapel, George Roche Sports Complex, Margot V. Biermann Athletic Center, and College Park Townhomes to enjoy.
Other than saying “Hi” to Gate Guy and occasionally taking out the dorm trash, many of us citizens of the ivory tower spend our eight months a year at Hillsdale wholly isolated from physical work. The demands of academic life, especially in conjunction with dorm living, leave little time for us to take on substantial physical work. Most students don’t cook or clean for themselves and aren’t responsible for childcare or the upkeep of a house. These privileges we enjoy are something to be grateful for, as they free us to give ourselves more fully to our studies.
Summer is the perfect time to reclaim your relationship with the physical world. It can take any number of paths: a full-time job on a farm or in a lumberyard, work taking care of children and housework, or a part-time role mowing lawns or doing odd jobs. Whatever it is, be deliberate in seeking out some physical challenge.
Hillsdale students are an intelligent bunch, and most are smart enough not to scorn manual professions like the trades or the work of keeping a home. Yet in remaining isolated from strenuous physical work — and no, sprinting to class doesn’t count — we miss out on an integral part of the human experience, one with the capacity to greatly enrich our intellectual and spiritual lives.
Besides yielding satisfying, tangible results, manual work frees intellectually-inclined students from inadvertently living the heresy of gnosticism, treating the physical world as less worthy of care and attention. That includes one’s body, which manual work both challenges and strengthens.
In treating physical work as unworthy of our time, we also miss out on its meditative nature. When the body is occupied, the mind runs free. A long afternoon spent digging in a backyard garden, smeared in engine grease up to the elbows or speckled with fresh paint, is ripe time for contemplation — most of all, if you embrace the sounds of the task rather than using music to drown your thoughts. If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, then busy hands are instruments of good.
The mundane nature of most ordinary manual tasks — laundry, dishes, and cleaning up — provide all of us the opportunity to undertake a task not because it is thrilling or fun, but because it is an opportunity to serve the people around us and Creation itself.
Though most Hillsdale graduates work a job that demands more intellectual than physical effort, adult life, especially parenthood and homeownership, entails fundamentally embodied roles. Parents change diapers, haul toddlers and baby carriers around, lug groceries inside in a single trip, and get dragged into games of freeze tag. Homeowners scrub floors, fix cabinets, and heave sofas up stairs. The sooner we learn to embrace and enjoy physical work, the better we will be equipped to meet the demands of a life beyond Hillsdale.
We aren’t brains in a vat. So use this summer to stretch your physical capabilities, and bring out into the sunshine the wisdom you’ve gained in dusty classrooms.
Caroline Kurt is a junior studying English.
