The task, which demanded the use of my whole body, was edging. Edging, if I am honest, is one of those things that isn't technically necessary, Nice, neat, clearly defined boundaries to the driveway and the sidewalk are more a matter of personal preference than some pressing exigency. Given that I really don't mind that my lawn is a heterogeneous blend of grasses and chickweed, it seems a little silly to desire neat linear boundaries around that mottled miscellany of variant green hues and tiny flowers.
But I do. It's so satisfying.
I tend to use a string trimmer to edge, but as the years have progressed, the lawn has begun to make incursions onto the concrete nevertheless, soil and groundcover spreading out onto the sidewalk. Not much, mind you. Just an inch or two on either side. There was still plenty of sidewalk. But it was losing that tidyness that makes a well edged lawn so satisfying, a marker that all is in order, in the way that a perfectly made bed can some days feel like the only sanctuary from the chaos of life.
So I was doing some more aggressive edging to re-establish the boundaries. Power edgers are the way of the American suburb now, because they get the job done far quicker and with less effort. Just drop a hundred and sixty to four hundred bucks, and the task will be complete before you know it.
I wasn't doing that. I was using a metal t-bar attached to a flat blade. No battery. No gas. Just me, my middle aged back and arms and legs, and my middle aged mass pressing down. I'd line the blade up to a prior cut, then step down hard, then pull the blade from the earth, then repeat. Ten inches at a time, slowly and surely working my way down the sidewalk. It took about an hour.
I was not Optimized. I was not Efficient. I was Going to Feel It Later. I could have been Using My Time More Productively. Let a machine do it, whispered our culture. You have better things to do.
Do I? What better thing is there than to work in one's garden on a spring afternoon?
We recoil at the idea that machine minds can now do all of our thinking for us, that our minds will atrophy away into nothing if there is literally nothing left for us to do. But this loss didn't begin with AI. If machines do everything for us, if mechanisms and conveniences mean that we never once need to strain and feel the sweat blossoming on our brows, we lose all that comes with work that is incarnate, enfleshed, and that uses the living form we've been given. That work has value. It's real. And being in the world has other collateral benefits.
During that hour, I talked with passing neighbors. "Doing it old school, I see," said one. "Yup. Good exercise on a beautiful afternoon," I replied, and she smiled.
I heard the squeals of delight as children up the street ran around in circles, chasing one another across their yard, delighting in the blessing of being embodied.
Work, understood rightly, can be just as satisfying.
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