The Burden and the Joy

One of my favorite movies is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. It’s an epic about the, duh, last emperor of China, Puyi, who was raised as a child in the Forbidden City and enjoyed all the advantages, riches, privilege, women, and catering to one could hope for, only to see it all fade away and be taken from him as the world changed and communists took over.

For all the beautiful imagery in the film (and it’s STUNNING), the image that sticks the most is of the emperor’s final days as an old man tending to his garden. The end of his life could not be in starker contrast to the beginning. It’s the boy king brought low, his fingers dirty and clawing at the one bit of soil he still commands.

And he’s happy.

The movie was released in 1987 and I first saw it on home video a few years later. I was young, is what I’m saying, and the impression left by that final scene of the old, deposed emperor was lifelong. I couldn’t understand it. After everything he had–all that power and all that fame and all those rich experiences–how could he be happy as an anonymous old man?

I couldn’t understand it because I wasn’t equipped at that time to understand such a thing. I didn’t know what lay ahead in my life, but whatever else my hazy, formless future held, I knew I wanted it to be big. That it should be big. And important. And significant in some way. How could anything else be satisfactory?

One of the first jobs I ever held was working at a Trap and Skeet club my father managed. I complained to dad constantly about the sweaty, menial labor he required of me: hauling hay, restocking shelves, moving heavy boxes, etc.

It wasn’t that it was beneath me, it was that it was all such a distraction from…I didn’t know what, exactly. I just knew that these everyday, repetitive tasks were not in any way important. And I wanted to do important things.

As you can imagine, this meant I wasn’t very good at things like cleaning my room, taking out the trash, and keeping up with my chores generally at home. Those are all unimportant things. Meaningless.

How could the former emperor of China be happy tending to a garden?

My life now is much different, and quite a bit different than I ever imagined. It took me a long time to figure out what “important” thing I was supposed to be doing.* And now that I’m finally here?

*(“Importance” being a relative and debatable thing; what I was really struggling towards was a thing suitable to my talents and tastes, but in our ego-driven youth we often imagine ourselves not just the hero of our own story, but of every story.)

I kind of like doing the dishes.

I don’t garden, and I never will. But I do the dishes and I take out the trash and I clean the house and I vacuum and I, most of all, take care of Cami.

Cami is 18 years old, our second daughter, and she has some special needs. Because my work is most often done over the internet or on my laptop, I serve as her primary caregiver (unless I’m out of town, in which case it falls to my wife). My work day doesn’t start until I help Cami out of bed, help her with the restroom, administer her medications, get her dressed, fix her breakfast, clean her up afterwards, soothe her if he’s irritable, and try to divine her wants from signs only those closest to her can interpret (Cami is nonverbal). And that’s just the morning. A lot of this repeats throughout the day. It’s the kind of work that is beyond routine for me at this point.

I never talk about it, but it’s a big part of who I am and what I do. Never imagined that would be the case, but here we are. This makes my day a constant study in whiplash. In my work, right now, I’m approving VFX shots, meeting with producers, reviewing budgets and marketing materials, and just generally conducting the business of being a director of a feature film. And If I’m not on Zoom, I can almost guarantee you I’m on headphones and doing all this concurrently with fixing Cami a sandwich for lunch or helping her find just the right show on Disney+ or trying to get her shoes off her feet because she’s pointing at them and I know what that means.

And, I’ll be honest, for a long time now all of these tasks have been a bit of an irritant. I love Cami dearly, but she is also a burden. A burden I and my wife have always happily borne, but a burden nonetheless. To say otherwise would be maddening. And not true.

The divorce rate for couples with children with special needs is over 80%. You don’t make it through without (sometimes brutal) honestly. So, I’m bad at pretending.

Cami is a burden, but she is also a joy. And the particular joy I have found of late is in all the tasks I once disdained. The everyday, once-thought meaningless work that is essential to our family’s sustainability and to making life function on a basic level. The “unimportant” stuff.

That stuff is my refuge now. My break from the pressure and the grind and the BIGness of moviemaking.

But it’s not a simple matter of contrasts. I think, through doing this work that I’ve always regarded as so important (even when I didn’t know what it was), I’ve come to realize that, no, the other stuff really was more important than I gave it credit for all along. Maybe not MORE important, I don’t know, but up there. Maybe it doesn’t even shake out into gradations like that as though there’s some imaginary scale where this work is more special than that work. After all, none of us really know the impact of what we do.

So, it’s more than that. I think I’ve come to understand that work has its own intrinsic value, regardless of the relative value of the task. It’s the working, not the work. And, when that is the thing, the simpler the task involved the better because the reward—an addition and a bonus to that intrinsic value–is immediate.

There is a joy in a work completed, a task conquered. The dishes come out clean. The trash is removed. The daughter is happy.

Chores are not a chore, they are quick victories I can snatch from the jaws of a hurried life.

There is no way my younger self could make heads or tails of this essay, so it’s possible you’re having that experience, too. I’m just trying to put into words a feeling I’m having with increasing frequency, and I suspect I’m still at the beginning of fully grasping it. This may be clumsy.

But.

When I think back on Puyi tending to his garden now, I get it. I get the pleasure he must have gotten from that after the hurricane of his life had all played out. Simple, “unimportant,” repetitive, even-if-it’s-hard work can satisfy in a way big, “important,” constantly changing, highly difficult work cannot.

(I couldn’t find a good still from the movie, but I didn’t find this photo of the actual former emperor.)