karma

I carry the weight of some serious Protestant Work Ethic family karma.

I am descended from these characters on both sides. My mom's side at least mellowed into the kinder, gentler Methodists. Dad's? Hardcore Pilgrims, who first went to Holland, and then the "New World". Here are some of the roots of my family tree:


And from them descended a line of super-religious Presbyterians, many of them those travelling reverends. Here is a photo of my favorite one, Rev Nathaniel Oliver Cobb. Sometimes when I look at this, I can smell the brimstone:

So I felt so understood, so validated when I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. When she set out on a voyage of pleasure, something that seems like it would be so easy, she was able to articulate just why it became a challenge to her every fiber, to her very DNA:

Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of super conscientious people. My mother's family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they'd ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of them "oxen".) My father's side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad's family tree all the way to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.

Here's a cheery photo of some of those Puritan descendants of mine: The words that come to my mind when I look at them are "pinched" and "tired."

Sometimes it feels like my life is one that would make them all spin in their graves. Then again, I sometimes feel compelled to work harder, longer, do more, knowing it's never enough. That idle hands are the Devil's work, and that Goodness can be found in hard work, and that if it feels good, it must not be work, and is therefore inherently suspect at the very least.

At least I come by all this honestly.