V's Barbershop

Before

After

The Shoemaker (1930)

When I look at The Shoemaker by Tadeusz Makowski, what draws me in is not the hardship of the work, but the way time seems to gather around the figure. The shoemaker bends inward toward his task. His hands hold the shoe with a care that suggests not urgency, but attention. The walls are crowded with finished shoes. They are the evidence of repetition, of days accumulated into years, and yet the figure has not vanished into the work. He remains present. The work has not consumed him; it has shaped him.

This is why I see my great-grandfather here. He died long before I was born, but his life reaches me through photographs and stories. He was shoemaker among many other forms of labor. Others in my line were miners, factory workers, wire pullers, secretaries, water-plant employees, teachers, house keepers, and housewives. People whose identities were not articulated so much as enacted. Their lives were structured by work that demanded time, patience, and consequence. Meaning did not arrive through reflection first; it emerged through how their days were spent.

As I move through another application season, this time for administrative roles, I find myself returning to this image not out of anxiety, but contemplation. I am less concerned with advancement than with formation. The question that lingers is not whether I am capable of this work, but what kind of self it will continue to form. This is where religious language becomes useful in helping me articulate my thoughts, not as doctrine but as a vocabulary for attention.

Religion, at its most elemental, has always been concerned with time. Not how efficiently it is used, but how it is ordered. It asks what a life is shaped by through repetition. It asks what practices quietly form character long before beliefs are articulated. In this sense, religion does not begin with transcendence, but with discipline: with how ordinary days are given shape and meaning.

The Buddhist notion of Right Livelihood (sammā ājīva), articulated within the Noble Eightfold Path, names this concern with particular clarity. Right Livelihood does not evaluate work by status or reward. It asks whether the way one earns a living allows intention, action, and consequence to remain aligned. Because work occupies so much of one’s time, it becomes one of the most powerful forces in identity formation. A livelihood forms the self whether one intends it to or not.

This contemplative concern echoes the early humanism of Karl Marx, who understood labor as a primary site of self-recognition. For Marx, work is not merely a means of survival; it is a way human beings come to know themselves. When labor is whole and intelligible, identity coheres. When labor is abstracted, reduced to output, metrics, or symbolic value the worker becomes alienated. Time is consumed without forming the self. “The worker puts his life into the object,” Marx writes, “but now his life no longer belongs to him, but to the object.”

This sense of time emptied of formation surfaced recently in a conversation with a friend who works in construction. Their work pays well, far more than my teacher’s salary ever has or will, but as they spoke about building coffee shops and dentist offices, spaces designed for consumption and efficiency, I felt a quiet hollowness. Not judgment toward them, but a sense that something was missing. The work produces value, but it feels thin. It does not seem to ask much of the self beyond speed and compliance.

What lingers beneath that conversation is a cultural theology that equates prosperity with meaning. The assumption, often unspoken, is that if work pays well, it must therefore be good; if it produces visible success, it must therefore be worth one’s time. Religion, at its most reflective, resists this collapse. It insists that time itself is formative, and that how we spend it shapes who we become, regardless of what it earns.

This is why I return to Martin Luther King Jr. and his insistence on dignity as a matter of presence rather than position:

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted… and all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

King’s claim is not romantic. It is contemplative. Greatness here is not about visibility or reward, but about inhabitation. Greatness here is about giving oneself fully to the work at hand. Time becomes meaningful when it is lived attentively, not when it is merely filled.

Makowski’s shoemaker embodies this inhabitation. The work is repetitive, enclosed, and modest, yet the figure remains inside it rather than estranged from it. This is what Right Livelihood names. It is not purity or prestige, but coherence. The shoemaker’s time has not been emptied of self. He is still being formed by what he does.

This is the posture I find myself in now. Not a crisis, not a refusal, but a pause. A moment to reflect on what kind of work continues to shape me in ways I can recognize and live with. Marx helps me name the risk of alienation when work becomes abstract. Buddhism helps me name the risk of dispersion when attention is scattered. Religion, more broadly, gives me permission to slow down and consider how my time is forming me.

Remembering my lineage in this moment is not an argument against moving forward. It is a way of orienting myself before doing so. The people I come from did not theorize their work, but they lived its demands. Their identities were formed because their time required presence. This moment of contemplation is simply an attempt to honor that inheritance and to ask, carefully, whether the next way I give my time will still allow me to remain whole, attentive, and recognizable to myself.

Catch Me If You Can

The Rockwell's Complete Book of Roses

 

MoPAL Scholar Meeting