80. A Day of Jubilee – Marcus G. Miller
My father once told me that success is the price of admission to the next challenge.
My father once told me that success is the price of admission to the next challenge. He told this to me after having received high praise for leading a successful project at work, and at that moment, I could detect, but could not yet name, several emotional colors blazing out of his eyes. There was the simple crimson pride of a job well done, there was the effervescent azure ebullience induced by the promise of a bright future, there was earthy brown contemplation of a warrior taking a moment's rest, and there was black love. The love was black because he, in his blackness, was able to claim a level of victory that eluded so many men of his father’s generation, and men of his own. And he could take that lesson, a life-affirming blueprint for managing success, and teach it—from the full weight of the experience—to his black son. The words were clever enough as an aphorism, but what was transmitted to me was the full spectrum of what it meant to him to say those words. It nearly brought me to tears.
And so when considering Juneteenth, that shining golden day in 1865 when General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and proclaimed the freedom of the black women and men who were enslaved there, even though the Emancipation Proclamation had come two and a half years earlier; when considering their joy, and jubilee, and dancing, I hear the words of my father. I see the pink and purple and candied red of their celebration, and I see the long grey road ahead, through history, connecting them to the colorful eyes of my father, connecting them to me.
Let us hold labor and liberation in balance. Let us refuse to work without rest and reward, but also let us not eat, drink, and be merry, believing that tomorrow we will die. Let us mark every accomplishment with its deserved color, then let us not forget to look up at the ominous white snow-capped peaks of the mountains we must yet climb.
– Marcus G. Miller
Prompt:
How did you learn (or how are you learning) to balance work and play?
Anne Francey
Location: Saratoga Springs, NY
About: I am a visual artist. I always look for playful encounters in my studio as a chance to understand an elusive meaning or clarify an idea. Often, the prompts from the Isolation Journals have sparked fertile intersections between the written word and the visual world.
Age: 64
I did not learn. I am actually trying to erase the difference between work and play, to see it all as living. The intensity with which I do either one needs to learn to become its own grace.
Lorelle Mariel Murzello
Location: Mumbai, India
About: My name is Lorelle and I am a Teacher-educator, researcher and writer from Mumbai, India. The Isolation Journals has been that window to my soul and helped me understand this (crazy!) world and my place in it!
Age: 25
“BALANCE”
They tell you, “There’s no other way
Than to hustle and toil night & day…
At work you’ve bosses and colleagues to please
So always ensure their egos are appeased”.
A year into this I realized, however
That all work and no play, is not at all clever
Taking time for your body and mind to rest is like breathing
Without it, life has no meaning.
My mind was consumed
By excel sheets and deadlines
While my guitar silently wept,
On the sidelines
An epiphany struck
After burning some fingers;
After all that time
When I let self-doubt linger.
The chaos of work and play
Presents quite a challenge
I’ve yet to learn how to
Strike the right balance.